When I first started using Linux in the late 1990s, getting Linux to successfully run on a laptop was the stuff of legends. You might be able to get a distribution installed, but having functional wireless connectivity or sound might well be beyond your skill level. Sometimes it'd mean compiling a custom kernel or installing/patching firmware. No matter what route you took, it required time and effort enough that when you did finally get everything working as it should, you felt like a rock star.
Those were the days.
These days, Linux just works. It's a rare occasion that I run into a piece of hardware that Linux cannot handle. Sure, you might have to install a driver now and then, but even those bits of software are readily available.
This month, the Wisconsin state government declined to pay the refundable tax subsidies to Foxconn, the Taiwanese conglomerate that arrived in Wisconsin in 2017 with the promise of a plant that would make LCD TVs and monitors and employ 13,000 people. It seems this "project" never did really get off the ground. The original vision of 13,000 workers soon scaled down to 5,200; then it plummeted still further as no one seemed to have a vision for what these people were going to do. After it became clear that it wouldn't be profitable to make LCD screens (something neither the company nor the state seriously investigated before announcing the deal), Foxconn searched for other uses of the gigantic space they had already built. Casting about for an endeavor that would allow them to hang onto the subsidies, they explored alternatives such as innovation services, fish farming, and storage. Eventually, they just started adding workers to hit the minimum target of 520 employees by the end of 2019, but the government concluded these last-minute employees, many of whom didn't have a clear job assignment, were not eligible to be counted under the terms of the contract. As of now, there is still no plan for what to do with the space, but it seems very unlikely that anyone will ever use it for LCD fabrication or any other high-tech manufacturing.
It is always easy to point fingers after this kind of train wreck. The administration of former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker certainly deserves some heat for their naivetÃË. The national administration didn't help, declaring at the ground breaking that the Foxconn plant would be the "eighth wonder of the world." And, if you're one who believes that all Asian companies are scarily efficient and well run, the recent story of the Wisconsin project at The Verge [1] will surely disabuse you of this preconception with regard to Foxconn.
Today we're looking at a really neat tool for building GTK dialogs from your terminal called yad otherwise as yet another dialog, this isn't the only tool of it's kind that exists but there is so much that you can do with it that I could just not do a video on it.
This week we’re going to take a look at Cloud Migration & Backup Strategies and we ask the question what should your personal cloud strategy be. Then we’re going to take a look at Ubuntu 20.10 and see what new features are available in this latest release. Then we discuss the DMCA takedown of Youtube-dl tool and whether this puts other open source tools at risk or is fair game for protecting content creators revenue. In our gaming section we talk about streaming your PS4 games to Linux! Later in the show, we’ll give you our popular tips/tricks and software picks. Plus so much more, on this week’s episode of Destination Linux.
Microsoft is making aggressive moves to court more and more developers. We put on our analyst hats and lay out the hard cold truth.
Plus our trouble with Gnomes, your feedback, and martinis on the moon.
Linux 5.10 brings several new features to the XFS filesystem. It solves the year 2038 problem, it supports metadata checksumming and it has better metadata verification. There's also a new configuration option: CONFIG_XFS_SUPPORT_V4. Older XFS filesystems using the v4 layout are now deprecated and there is no upgrade path beyond "backup and re-format". The Linux kernel will support older XFS v4 filesystems by default until 2025 and optional support will remain available until 2030.
A new CONFIG_XFS_SUPPORT_V4 option in Linux 5.10. In case you want to.. still be able to mount existing XFS filesystems if/when you upgrade to Linux 5.10.
We previously reported that XFS patches for Linux 5.10 delay the 2038 problem to 2486. That's not the only new feature Linux 5.10 brings to the XFS filesystem when it is released early December: It supports metadata checksumming, it has better built-in metadata verification and there is a new CONFIG_XFS_SUPPORT_V4 configuration option. Make sure you don't accidentally say N to that one if you have an older XFS filesystem you'd like to keep using if/when you upgrade your kernel.
With the WiMAX 802.16 standard not being widely used outside of the Aeronautical Mobile Airport Communication System (AeroMACS) and usage in some developing nations, the Linux kernel may end up dropping its support for WiMAX but first there is a proposal to demote it to staging while seeing if any users remain.
Longtime kernel developer Arnd Bergmann is proposing that the WiMAX Linux kernel infrastructure and the lone Intel 2400m driver be demoted from the networking subsystem to staging. In a future kernel release, the WiMAX support would be removed entirely if no active users are expressed.
The Linux kernel WiMAX infrastructure is just used by the Intel 2400m driver for hardware with Sandy Bridge and prior, thus of limited relevance these days. That Intel WiMAX implementation doesn't support the frequencies that AeroMACS operates at and there are no other large known WiMAX deployments around the world making use of the frequencies supported by the 2400m implementation or users otherwise of this Linux kernel code.
It's no loss. There is a reason why you have probably never seen a WiMAX device or heard of it, WiMAX was a wireless last-mile Internet solution mostly used in a few rural areas in a limited number of countries between 2005 and 2010. There is very little use for it today so it is almost natural that Linux is phasing out support for WiMAX and the one WiMAX device it supports.
WiMAX is a wireless protocol, much like IP by Avian Carriers except that it has less bandwidth and significantly lower latency.
WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) is a set of wireless standards that were used to provide last-mile Internet connectivity where DSL and other solutions were unavailable. WiMAX can work over long distances (up to 50 km), something WiFi can't. The initial design could provide around 25 megabit/s downstream, which was competitive when WiMAX base-stations and modems become widely available around 2005. That changed around 2010 when 4G/LTE become widely available.
The WiMAX Forum, who maintains the WiMAX standard, tried staying relevant with a updated standard called WiMAX 2 in 2011. Some equipment for it was made, but it never became a thing. WiMAX was pretty much dead by the time WiMAX 2 arrived.
The standard NetworkManager utility GNU/Linux distributions come with supported WiMAX until 2015. The Linux kernel still supports it and exactly one WiMAX device from Intel as of Linux 5.9, but that's about to change.
There's been some recent discussion about whether the X server is abandonware. As the person arguably most responsible for its care and feeding over the last 15 years or so, I feel like I have something to say about that.
The thing about being the maintainer of a public-facing project for nearly the whole of your professional career is it's difficult to separate your own story from the project. So I'm not going to try to be dispassionate, here. I started working on X precisely because free software had given me options and capabilities that really matter, and I feel privileged to be able to give that back. I can't talk about that without caring about it.
So here's the thing: X works extremely well for what it is, but what it is is deeply flawed. There's no shame in that, it's 33 years old and still relevant, I wish more software worked so well on that kind of timeframe. But using it to drive your display hardware and multiplex your input devices is choosing to make your life worse.
It is, however, uniquely well suited to a very long life as an application compatibility layer. Though the code happens to implement an unfortunate specification, the code itself is quite well structured, easy to hack on, and not far off from being easily embeddable.
Adam Jackson who on Red Hat's Graphics Team served as the X.Org Server release manager for many years and being heavily involved in the xorg-server development and related components as shared his views on whether the X.Org Server is "abandonware."
A Sony engineer confirmed at this week's Embedded Linux Conference Europe that the company has begun using the Flutter toolkit atop Wayland as their means of developing user-interfaces on embedded systems.
Hidenori Matsubayashi of Sony talked at ELCE 2020 about their evaluation of different GUI toolkits for embedded use and ultimately how they fell for Flutter and Wayland. They came to that decision when evaluating the likes of Electron, Qt, GTK, WebKit/Chromium with WebView, and the many other options out there.
Their design requirements were needing to be able to make "beautiful" user interfaces, support easy development, exhibit low CPU and RAM requirements, work across display servers and software stacks, and the toolkit must allow use within proprietary software.
Lisa Su is about to begin the presentation unveiling the much anticipated Radeon RX 6000 "Big Navi" (RDNA 2) graphics cards. This article will be updated live as the event progresses but first up let's recap the current Linux open-source driver state for these forthcoming graphics cards.
Under the codename Sienna Cichlid, the Linux support for the next-generation Navi graphics cards have been underway going back to the middle of the year. There is initial support for the next-gen hardware within the recent released Linux 5.9 kernel and Mesa 20.2. This still puts it just out-of-reach for seeing out-of-the-box support in the likes of Ubuntu 20.10 given the 5.8 kernel so the user must manually move to the newer kernel. At least with the likes of Fedora Workstation 33 there will be Linux 5.9 as a stable release update. Also important to the driver equation is needing to be using LLVM 11.0+ for the GFX10.3 back-end target and also ensuring to have the latest linux-firmware for the binary microcode files needed for GPU initialization.
So at least going into this launch it's great there is at least open-source driver support available but not necessarily easy reach for all users right now. By the time of the spring 2021 Linux distributions like Ubuntu 21.04 there should be nice out-of-the-box support for those wanting good support without any hassles. Or if you are on an enterprise distribution like RHEL/CentOS or SUSE Linux Enterprise or Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, AMD should be providing their usual Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver that ships updated user and kernel-space components for deploying their driver that way.
Last week Intel open-source engineers began publishing Linux kernel patches for the "Alder Lake S" graphics support. That work should be found in the Linux 5.11 cycle being christened as stable in early 2021. In user-space, Alder Lake graphics patches also appeared for their OpenCL / oneAPI Level Zero compute stack and now merged into Mesa 20.3 as well for OpenGL / Vulkan support.
Given that Alder Lake is using Intel Xe "Gen12" graphics as found already for Tiger Lake and Rocket Lake, the actual driver-side enablement is quite minimal thanks to employing the existing code paths. The Alder Lake "ADL-S" support was merged into Mesa on Tuesday and is just 20 lines of new code. That consists of just adding the new PCI IDs and then the family bits for the Alder Lake family and indicating they make use of Gen12 features.
This release contains bug fixes to improve robustness. This release note describes what’s different between Istio 1.7.3 and Istio 1.7.4
Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, releases Charmed Kubeflow, a set of charm operators to deliver the 20+ applications that make up the latest version of Kubeflow, for easy consumption anywhere, from workstations to on-prem, public cloud, and edge.
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Kubeflow provides the cloud-native interface between Kubernetes, the industry standard for software delivery and operations at scale, and data science tools: libraries, frameworks, pipelines, and notebooks.
Machine learning pipelines on Kubernetes, with Kubeflow pipelines, enable factory-like processes for data science teams. Data scientists can experiment and build data pipelines on a single dashboard, while the underlying operations and infrastructure work are handled by Kubernetes administrators.
Many people enjoy listening to music to pass time and destress, and some people even listen to music while working to stay motivated and focused. Studies have shown that soft music can help employees stay motivated and increase productivity.
If you are a Linux user who enjoys listening to music while you are on your computer, then you are in luck, because there are variety of music players available for Linux. In this article, we are going to discuss the five best music players available for Linux.
Raspberry Pi 4 firmware supports USB boot. You can easily boot your favorite operating system on your Raspberry Pi 4 from a USB HDD, SSD, or a USB thumb drive instead of the traditional microSD card.
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In this section, I am going to show you how to enable USB boot on Raspberry Pi 4.
Before you can enable USB boot on your Raspberry Pi 4, you must update all the existing packages of your Raspberry Pi OS. So that we can update the firmware and enable USB boot.
Monitoring temperatures may be a requirement in many of your Raspberry Pi projects. It is relatively easy to do in Raspberry Pi and the components required for this project are not too costly.This article shows you how to use the DS18B20 digital thermometer module to monitor temperature using Raspberry Pi. The article also demonstrates how to create a web app to display the temperature.
Raspberry PI can provide a number of linux services able to easily solve problems to manage your home network with cheap solutions. Using an OS based on Debian, it can run Open Source software and drastically help you with your home ICT needs as well as small office needs.
A common need for increasing networking security and access your home services from outside is having a VPN (Virtual Private Network) server which grants secure access from an external network to your internal services.
A simple solution to implement OpenVPN or WireGuard (the 2 most widely known VPN open source serices) is using the convenient PiVPN setup tool.
In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to setup a VPN server with a cheap Raspberry PI Zero Wusing PiVPN and send certificate via email. This guide applies also to newer Raspberry PI boards.
If you write or use Ansible playbooks, then you're used to reading YAML configuration files. YAML can be deceptively simple and yet strangely overwhelming all at once, especially when you consider the endless possible Ansible modules at your disposal. It feels like it should be easy to jot down a few options in a YAML file and then run Ansible, but what options does your favorite module require? And why are some key-value pairs while others are lists?
YAML for Ansible can get complex, so understanding how Ansible modules translate to YAML is an important part of getting better at both. Before you can understand how YAML works for Ansible modules, you must understand the basics of YAML.
If you don't know the difference between a mapping block and a sequence block in YAML, read this quick introduction to the basics of YAML article.
SSDs are now commonplace and have been the default choice for performance-oriented disks in the enterprise and consumer environments for the past few years. SSDs are cool and fast but most people on high-end machines face this dilemma: My SSD is behind a RAID controller which doesn't expose the device's DISCARD or TRIM capabilities. How do I discard the blocks to keep the best SSD performance? Here's a trick to do just that without having to disassemble your machine. Recent improvements in SSD firmware have made the need for the applications writing to SSDs less stringent to use DISCARD/TRIM.
There are, however, some cases in which you may need to have the filesystem inform the drive of the blocks which it discarded. Perhaps you have TLC (3bits per cell) or QLC (4bits per cell) drives instead of the usually more expensive enterprise-class SLC or MLC drives (the latter are less susceptible to a performance drop since they put aside more extra blocks to help with overwrites when the drive is at capacity). Or maybe you once filled your SSD to 100%, and now you cannot get the original performance/IOPS back.
Among Us is incredibly popular, but, sadly, the game does not have a native port for Linux. Thankfully, with a little tweaking, it is possible to get Among Us working on the Linux platform!
XFCE4 is an excellent Linux desktop environment, but one of its shortcomings is that users aren’t able to access folders directly from the menu like other modern desktops such as Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, etc.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache JMeter on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, The Apache JMeter application is open-source software, a 100% pure Java application designed to load test functional behavior and measure performance. It was originally designed for testing Web Applications but has since expanded to other test functions.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation of Apache JMeter on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian based distribution like Linux Mint.
If you are a 3D computer graphics or animation enthusiast and are in search of some 3D modeling software, then you have come to the right place. There are many 3D modeling software programs available, many are good and are doing their jobs quite well, but they all come with a hefty price tag and high subscription fees. There is no need to pay heavy subscription fees when you have a free and powerful 3D creation tool at your fingertips, known as a Blender. Blender is a popular and open-source 3D creation software that can be used in 3D printer designs. It is a robust program that supports the entire pipeline of 3D creation, which includes modeling, shading, rigging, animation, and rendering. There is no need to get any supplementary programs because Blender lets you make games and edit videos.
Blender is quite easy to learn and has a great community to support you. This article introduces the basics of the Blender software to beginners. We will discuss the Blender user interface and some essential shortcut keys. If you are a beginner and want to start 3D modeling in Blender, then this article is for you.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Wireguard on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Wireguard is an open-source, dependable, advanced, VPN tunneling software you can install and use right now to create a secure, point-to-point connection to a server. It is cross-platform and can run almost anywhere, including Linux, Windows, Android, and macOS. Wireguard is a peer-to-peer VPN. it does not use the client-server model. Depending on its configuration, a peer can act as a traditional server or client.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation of Wireguard on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian based distribution like Linux Mint.
This post will explain how to use Dockerfiles in Docker. Learn how to launch Wordpress and MariaDB using your own Dockerfile.
In this tutorial we will show you how to install Wine on Linux Mint 20, as well as some extra required package by Wine
We know that a file in a computer system can be as small as a few Bytes or as large as a thousand Gigabytes. When you want to transmit a file from one end to another, its size plays a very important role in deciding whether you want to send it as it is or compress it. The .gz file format is a very commonly used compressed file format for the Linux operating system. Today, we will explore the methods of extracting and opening a .gz file in Linux.
In this tutorial, we will learn how to install and configure an FTP Server using vsftpd on an Ubuntu 20.04 based server. We will also learn how to sec...
In any UNIX or Linux system, the root account is the top in the hierarchy. It holds the utmost power over the system. For any system change, the root has to grant permission. The root user can also override any user’s permission and read or write data. Because the root account holds so much power, it is important to protect it from unwanted access.In the case of Ubuntu, the root account is disabled by default. However, you can still perform system changes. To do so, you need to know the root password. The problem arises when you have forgotten the root password.
Often times you will receive a recommendation that you should install Linux on an older PC. The thing is, Linux works extremely well on a new custom built PC, too. There are many users that are looking for a brand new Linux PC for home office use, workstation use, or other specialized uses. Here we walk you through how to build a new PC for Linux.
Mini Metro, the wonderful subway train-track building sort-of puzzle game just recently had a nice free content upgrade with more on the way. It's something of a masterpiece, and very highly rated so it's awesome to see it expand.
Across multiple maps you gradually build up and design a transport network that rapidly expands, the point is to get people across to the correct station as quickly as possible. It's a hard game to pin down to a particular genre too. Is it a puzzle game? Is it a strategy game? Well, both sort-of and it's also both relaxing and often a little stressful too but it's brilliant and many things more.
Love kicking ass and destroying Zombies? Check out the latest update to the excellent open-world parkour action in Dying Light with a new Left 4 Dead crossover event.
The special experience is live now until October 29 18:00, which will see you battle the Viral Rush event which is meant to emulate the hordes that appear in Left 4 Dead. To make it a bit more interesting and unique Techland added in a "new type of shotgun ammo that gives the infected a taste of fire and brimstone". If you don't like it, you can turn off the special events like this in the menu.
A thoroughly curious blend of genres this one with The Zone: Stalker Stories offering up exploration, deckbuilding, card battles and RPG elements. On top of that, you're also getting treated to a visual novel styled story that's being carefully crafted by industry veterans from Illuminated Games who worked on the likes of Mount&Blade, The Next World and more.
Inspired by the likes of Slay the Spire, S.T.A.L.K.E.R and Darkest Dungeon it's not going to be a roguelike, instead their plan is to offer a richly detailed story experience with hand-crafted environments with plenty to explore and secrets to find.
Caesar III continues to live on and get improvements on modern systems thanks to open source, with the Julius game engine continuing to mature.
On October 27, Julius 1.5.0 was released continuing to upgrade the experience. The current status is that it should be fully playable, with it largely focused on accuracy with the original game but with plenty of UI enhancements.
You've faced monsters before aplenty but what about nomsters? Moonshell Island looks and sounds like a delightful and rather quirky upcoming RPG.
Set on a whimsical island, Moonshell Island will feature a cast of charming characters, a "satisfying" action-battle system, plenty of mini-games and a "heartwarming tale of achieving dreams, supporting friends, and building a community". On a peaceful island these strange nomsters threaten the peace so "you must journey to find the source of the trouble and recruit the islanders to a safe haven, Crabby’s Cabana Club. As the club population grows, more services become available to aid you on your quest to uncover not only the secrets of the island, but also of yourself".
Enjoyed classics like Earthbound and Chrono Trigger? Take a look at The Last Relic, an in-development RPG from developer Christopher Hall Guay.
"The Last Relic follows the tale of a young girl named Ellie who is transported from her cozy, American life to a foreign realm of magic and monsters. Lost and alone, she wanders this new land aimlessly, wishing only to get back home. She's attacked by monsters only to be rescued by a young man named Dorian. It's here Ellie learns that she is far from Earth, in the land of Relics and Relic Hunters. Why was she brought here? And will she ever make it back home?"
ixOS is an operating system where everything from the Kernel, applications, system packages, and configuration files are built by the OS’s own Nix package manager. These packages are stored in isolation from one another because of which directories like /bin, /sbin, /lib are absent, and a separate directory /nix/store is maintained.
Due to this, NixOS aims at providing great system configuration management. The latest version of the OS NixOS 20.09 brings many important and subtle changes to the mix.
In June this year, the FreeBSD team released a fifth and final version 11.4 of the FreeBSD 11-STABLE branch. Now continuing the development of the latest stable 12.x series of FreeBSD, a new production snapshot, FreeBSD 12.2, has been announced.
Subsequently, this third point update of the 12-STABLE branch brings numerous changes and enhancements to the FreeBSD kernel, userland, bootloader, and networking.
What’s New In FreeBSD 12.2?
Starting with the kernel changes, it has added support for APEI (ACPI Platform Error Interfaces) and enabled ixl driver by default for FreeBSD/powerpc64. The ixl driver provides support for any PCI Express adapter or LOM (LAN On Motherboard) in the Intel Ethernet 700 Series.
Another important update is pushed to the jail utility, which now allows you to run Linux in a jailed environment.
Kodi is a free and open-source media player software application developed by the XBMC Foundation, a non-profit technology consortium. Kodi is available for multiple operating systems and hardware platforms, with a software 10-foot user interface for use with televisions and remote controls.
Fedora 33 is released with many new features and updates. Here is a list of 10 things to do after installing Fedora 33.
The Fedora Project has announced the general availability of Fedora 33. Fedora 33 enhancements are aimed at improving the overall experience for both new and advanced users by integrating a more seamless design and mature filesystem.
The latest version also provides a foundation for new use cases, like IoT and edge computing.
The introduction of GNOME 3.38, with a new Tour application, provides an easier start for new users.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Fedora 33 and some of the applications pre-installed.
The new Fedora 33 Workstation comes with the greatly improved GNOME 3.38, desktop. If you aren't already familiar with GNOME, Fedora is not the Linux you want to learn it on. Try Ubuntu or openSUSE to get to know GNOME.
However, if you're a fan of immutable desktops, you may want to check out Fedora Silverblue instead of Fedora Workstation.
Silverblue tends to be more stable than other desktops. Also, if something does go wrong, you can easily reboot and rollback to the last working version. And if the rollback goes wrong, you can still download and boot any other image that was generated in the past, using the ostree command.
All versions of Fedora are built on top of the Linux 5.8.15 kernel. For applications, it comes with the usual assortment of the latest versions of LibreOffice, office suite, and Firefox, web browser.
Fedora 33 Workstation is the latest release of our free, leading-edge operating system. You can download it from the official website here right now. There are several new and noteworthy changes in Fedora 33 Workstation.
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Fresh Fedora 33 installations will set the EDITOR environment variable to nano by default. This change affects several command line tools that spawn a text editor when they require user input. With earlier releases, this environment variable default was unspecified, leaving it up to the individual application to pick a default editor. Typically, applications would use vi as their default editor due to it being a small application that is traditionally available on the base installation of most Unix/Linux operating systems. Since Fedora 33 includes nano in its base installation, and since nano is more intuitive for a beginning user to use, Fedora 33 will use nano by default. Users who want vi can, of course, override the value of the EDITOR variable in their own environment. See the Fedora change request for more details.
Candidates may self-nominate. If you nominate someone else, please check with them to ensure that they are willing to be nominated before submitting their name.
The steering bodies are currently selecting interview questions for the candidates.
Nominees submit their questionnaire answers via a private Pagure issue. The Election Wrangler or their backup will publish the interviews to the Community Blog before the start of the voting period. Fedora Podcast episodes will be recorded and published as well.
Please note that the interview is mandatory for all nominees. Nominees not having their interview ready by end of the Interview period (2020-11-19) will be disqualified and removed from the election.
Sometimes migration/modernization projects are hard to execute because there are many technical challenges, like the structure of legacy code, customer environment, customer bureaucracy, network issues, and the most feared of all, production bugs. In this post I'm going to explain the 12-step migration / modernization procedure I follow as a consultant using a tip-based approach.
I have some experience with this kind of situation because I’ve already passed by different kinds of projects with several kinds of problems. Over time you start to recognize patterns and get used to solving the hard problems.
So, I thought: Wouldn't it be cool to create a procedure based on my experience, so that I can organize my daily work and give the transparency that the customers and managers want?
To test this out, I did this for one customer in my hometown. They were facing a Red Hat JBoss EAP migration/modernization project. The results of the project were outstanding. The customer said they were even more satisfied with the transparency. The project manager seemed really comfortable knowing all about the details through the project and pleased with reducing the risk of unexpected news.
We are nearly at the end of 2020 and while the pace continues to increase, we want to take a moment to acknowledge and celebrate some of the successes of Red Hat's people and their work. In the last four months, several Red Hatters and Red Hat products are being recognized by leading industry publications and organizations for efforts in driving innovation.
As we look across the most rapidly transforming industries like financial services, healthcare, retail – and now advertising, developers are putting open source technologies to work to deliver next-generation features. Our enterprise clients are looking for AI solutions that will scale with trust and transparency to solve business problems. At IBM€®, I have the pleasure of focusing on equipping you, the developers, with the capabilities you need to meet the heightened expectations you face at work each day.
We’re empowering open source developers to drive the critical transformation to AI in advertising. For instance, at the IBM Center for Open source Data and AI Technologies (CODAIT), enterprise developers can find open source starting points to tackle some of your thorniest challenges. We’re making it easy for developers to use and create open source AI models that can ultimately help brand marketers go deeper with AI to reach consumers more effectively.
Following last week's Ubuntu 20.10 "Groovy Gorilla" release, Ubuntu 21.04 development is now getting underway as the Hirsute Hippo.
Succeeding the "GG" series is Ubuntu 21.04 the Hirsute (Hairy) Hippo in following their usual naming convention. This is now the third time of Ubuntu seeing a "HH" release following the Ubuntu 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog and Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron releases.
The release schedule for Ubuntu 21.04 puts the official release on 22 April, the beta on 1 April, and the feature freeze on 25 February as the prominent dates of the cycle.
The Ubuntu 21.04 toolchain upload is beginning tomorrow and expect more Debian changes to begin flowing into the Ubuntu Hirsute archive shortly. Hirsute uploads can be monitored via Launchpad.
Orchard Audio has launched an $800 “PecanPi Streamer Ultra” that adds a 5-inch touchscreen to the Raspberry Pi 3-based audio streamer. Orchard is also prepping a “PecanPi USB/SPDIF” DAC and amp that overrides your computer or phone audio.
Last year, Orchard Audio found success with a well-reviewed PecanPi DAC Raspberry Pi add-on and PecanPi Streamer device based on it. Now, the company has returned with a PecanPi Streamer Ultra, a larger, 195 x 120 x 100mm variant of the Streamer with a 5-inch, 800 x 480-pixel touchscreen. Orchard Audio also teased a PecanPi USB/SPDIF (see farther below).
Aaeon’s -10 to 60€°C tolerant “Boxer-8250AI” AI edge computer runs Linux on a Jetson Xavier NX along with 5x GbE ports for IP cameras plus 4x USB 3.0, 2x COM, and an HDMI port.
Aaeon has launched a $1,116 computer for embedded AI processing that combines the Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX module of its more compact Boxer-8251AI with a feature set like its Jetson Nano based Boxer-8220AI. The new Boxer-8250AI is larger than the Boxer-8220AI at 175.8 x 100 x 39mm and similarly provides 5x GbE ports for running IP cameras.
v1.0.3 released!
This is a minor maintenance update that fixes a couple of minor bugs, addresses a Sphinx deprecation issue, drops support for Python 3.4 and 3.5, and adds support for Python 3.8 and 3.9 (largely adding those environments to the test suite).
Why you should take a look at Everett
At Mozilla, I'm using Everett for a variety of projects: Mozilla symbols server, Mozilla crash ingestion pipeline, and some other tooling. We use it in a bunch of other places at Mozilla, too.
In addition to our brief update on extensions in Firefox 83, this post contains information about changes to the Firefox release calendar and a feature preview for Firefox 84.
Thanks to a contribution from Richa Sharma, the error message logged when a tabs.sendMessage is passed an invalid tabID is now much easier to understand. It had regressed to a generic message due to a previous refactoring.
Adding to the list of changes coming with the Qt 6 toolkit, The Qt Company has now outlined their initial implementation of a package manager to provide additional Qt6 modules.
A new release of Qt for MCUs is now available in the Qt Installer. If you are new to Qt for MCUs, you can try it out here. Version 1.5 introduces new platform APIs for easy integration of Qt for MCUs on any microcontroller, along with an in-depth porting guide to get you going. Additionally, it includes a set of C++ APIs to load new images at runtime into your QML GUI. As with every release, 1.5 also includes API improvements and bug fixes, enhancing usability and stability.
KDDockWidgets v1.1 is now available!
Although I just wrote about v1.0 last month, the 1.1 release still managed to get a few big features.
A year ago KDAB started a YouTube channel dedicated to software development with Qt, C++ and 3D technologies like OpenGL. We talked to Sabine Faure, who is in charge of the program, about how it worked out so far and what we can expect in the future.
Contact forms are commonly used in web applications because they allow the visitors of the website to communicate with the owner of the website. For most websites, responsive contact forms can be easily accessed from various types of devices such as desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones. In this tutorial, a responsive contact form is implemented, and the submitted data is sent as an email using PHP.
Having recently worked with young web developers who were exposed for the first time to proper production infrastructure, I received many questions about the various components that one can find in the architecture of a "Web service". These questions clearly expressed the confusion (and sometimes the frustration) of developers who understand how to create endpoints in a high-level language such as Node.js or Python, but were never introduced to the complexity of what happens between the user's browser and their framework of choice. Most of the times they don't know why the framework itself is there in the first place. The challenge is clear if we just list (in random order), some of the words we use when we discuss (Python) Web development: HTTP, cookies, web server, Websockets, FTP, multi-threaded, reverse proxy, Django, nginx, static files, POST, certificates, framework, Flask, SSL, GET, WSGI, session management, TLS, load balancing, Apache. In this post, I want to review all the words mentioned above (and a couple more) trying to build a production-ready web service from the ground up. I hope this might help young developers to get the whole picture and to make sense of these "obscure" names that senior developers like me tend to drop in everyday conversations (sometimes arguably out of turn). As the focus of the post is the global architecture and the reasons behind the presence of specific components, the example service I will use will be a basic HTML web page. The reference language will be Python but the overall discussion applies to any language or framework. My approach will be that of first stating the rationale and then implementing a possible solution. After this, I will point out missing pieces or unresolved issues and move on with the next layer. At the end of the process, the reader should have a clear picture of why each component has been added to the system.
In the last few years, web scraping has been one of my day to day and frequently needed tasks. I was wondering if I can make it smart and automatic to save lots of time. So I made AutoScraper!
A couple of weeks ago I released version 0.8 of django-render-block, this was followed up with a 0.8.1 to fix a regression.
django-render-block is a small library that allows you render a specific block from a Django (or Jinja) template, this is frequently used for emails when you want multiple pieces of an email together in a single template (e.g. the subject, HTML body, and text body), but they need to be rendered separately before sending.
We’re very excited to release Pyston v2, a faster and highly compatible implementation of the Python programming language. Version 2 is 20% faster than stock Python 3.8 on our macrobenchmarks. More importantly, it is likely to be faster on your code. Pyston v2 can reduce server costs, reduce user latencies, and improve developer productivity.
Pyston v2 is easy to deploy, so if you’re looking for better Python performance, we encourage you to take five minutes and try Pyston. Doing so is one of the easiest ways to speed up your project.
Version 2.0 of Pyston is now available, the Python implementation originally started by Dropbox that builds on LLVM JIT for offering faster Python performance.
Pyston developers believe their new release is about 20% faster than the standard Python 3.8 and should be faster for most Python code-bases.
Python is one of the universal languages that support various types of data types like integer, decimal point number, string, and complex number. We can convert one type of data type to another data type in Python. This data type conversion process is called typecasting. In Python, an integer value can easily be converted into a string by using the str() function. The str() function takes the integer value as a parameter and converts it into the string. The conversion of int to string is not only limited to the str() function. There are various other means of int to string conversion. This article explains the int to string conversion with various methods.
Python is one of the best and efficient high-level programming languages. It has a very straightforward and simple syntax. It has very built-in modules and functions that help us to perform the basic tasks efficiently. The Python isinstance() function evaluates either the given object is an instance of the specified class or not.
With the evolution of the internet, JavaScript has grown in popularity as a programming language due to its many useful methods. For example, many websites use JavaScript’s built-in setTimeout method to delay tasks. The setTimeout method has many use cases, and it can be used for animations, notifications, and functional execution delays.Because JavaScript is a single-threaded, translative language, we can perform only one task at a time. However, by using call stacks, we can delay the execution of code using the setTimeout method. In this article, we are going to introduce the setTimeout method and discuss how we can use it to improve our code.
At times, you may need to remove characters from a string. Whatever the reason is, Linux provides you with various built-in, handy tools that allow you to remove characters from a string in Bash. This article shows you how to use those tools to remove characters from a string.
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Sed is a powerful and handy utility used for editing streams of text. It is a non-interactive text editor that allows you to perform basic text manipulations on input streams. You can also use sed to remove unwanted characters from strings.
For demonstration purposes, we will use a sample string and then pipe it to the sed command.
In 2015, Caroline Sinders was working as a design researcher at IBM when she began to have questions about how Watson, the company’s artificial intelligence system, was being developed. AI systems like Watson must be “trained” with data sets—for example, given a large batch of confirmed photographs of stop signs from different angles, in different lighting, and of different quality to be able to recognize stop signs on their own. Sinders was curious about these data sets: The process of correctly categorizing millions of data points seemed like a herculean task in its own right; where, exactly, was all this data coming from?
After a couple of weeks of rumor, as well as a couple of years of hearsay, AMD has gone feet first into a full acquisition of FPGA manufacturer Xilinx. The deal involves an all-stock transaction, leveraging AMD’s sizeable share price in order to enable an equivalent $143 per Xilinx share – current AMD stockholders will still own 74% of the combined company, while Xilinx stockholders will own 26%. The combined $135 billion entity will total 13000 engineers, and expand AMD’s total addressable market to $110 Billion. It is believed that the key reasons for the acquisition lie in Xilinx’s adaptive computing solutions for the data center market.
AMD has announced 3 high-end graphics cards based on the RDNA2 architecture. Their new mid-range RX 6800 card, comparable to a Nvidia 2080ti, will cost $579 when it becomes available on November 18th. AMDs new RX 6900 XT flagship GPU will cost a whopping $999 when it launches on December 8th.
It has been more than a decade since AMD has had anything to show in the very high-end graphics market. Now they do if the marketing video AMD released today is anything to go by. Their new flagship GPU, the RX 6900 XT, is comparable to Nvidias top-of-the-line RTX 3090 graphics card if the FPS numbers AMD presented are realistic.
It has done just about everything wrong, from the failure to contain the virus early on to the lack of effective coordination thereafter. As the predicted second wave begins to build — the world is now adding over 400,000 new cases per day — it is truly disheartening to think that the international community hasn’t really learned any lessons from its snafu.
Sure, some countries have successfully managed the crisis. South Korea, despite several superspreading outbreaks, has kept its death toll to below 450, which is fewer than Washington, D.C. alone has suffered. Thailand, Vietnam, Uruguay, and New Zealand have all done even better to address the public health emergency.
One critic charged that the agency "has shown such callous indifference to the damage dicamba has caused to farmers and wildlife alike."
COVID-19 is the most dangerous health disaster to hit the United States since the flu epidemic of 1918. Yet Donald Trump hasn’t grasped its significance or the damage it has caused to Americans since he first learned of the disease Jan. 28 and didn’t tell us.
And the Trump administration seemed to surrender to the disease, abandoning any attempt to control its spread and essentially serving notice it is helpless, leaving 330 million people without central leadership and that it’s everyone for themselves. Instead, it is waiting for a vaccine, which may not be widely available until the middle of next year.
Nearly a year since the height of a devastating government offensive that forced a million people from their homes in Syria’s rebel-held northwest, doctors and aid workers are warning that the region’s civilians, especially young children, face a new threat: rising hunger. Doctor Firas Hamdo, a paediatrician and nutrition specialist, is among those who for months have been witnessing an increase of malnutrition cases at the children’s hospital where he works in Taftanaz, a town in Idlib province. Among those cases is an eight-month-old baby. Her family fled the bombardment in Idlib just a month before she was born. While her mother sits nearby, Hamdo uses a measuring tape to record the circumference of her upper arm, a method used to identify the risk of malnutrition. At a tiny 10 centimetres, the girl’s arm is on the tape’s colour-coded red zone. She is given a dosage of F-75, the powdered milk that is one of the first phases of treatment for those diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition (SAM) – the most serious and visible form of malnutrition in children under the age of five.
The bookmark was creeping on my browser’s toolbar for months. “Cryptographic Autonomy License” CAL-1.0 on the Open Source Initiative webpage. But today, I decided it was time to do my first amateur license review. This is a fun exercise (for me). Do not take this too seriously!
The Cryptographic Autonomy License is one of newest Open Source licenses on the block. The Open Source Initiative approved it in February 2020. This license also made ripples when it came through. But the question I had, and could not find a clear answer to, was why is it so interesting?
This blog post is my attempt to do a casual coffee-table review of the license. If you agree or disagree, I encourage you to leave a comment and share your opinion and why!
Hiring people with skills in open-source software suites such as Linux is becoming a priority for more businesses, new research has revealed.
The 2020 Open Source Jobs Report from the Linux Foundation, prepared in collaboration with edX, which is a non-profit online learning platform founded by Harvard and MIT, found 81% of respondents confirmed that hiring open source talent is a priority for them in 2020.
93% of hiring managers report difficulty finding sufficient talent with open source skills, up from 87% two years ago, showing that qualified open source talent is still in short supply.
Moreover, while open source wasn’t immune to the ill-effects of the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, its impact on professionals with open source prowess was limited. As per the survey, only 4% of employers laid off open source professionals due to COVID-19.
The good news is that hiring is already picking back up, with 37% of hiring managers saying they will be hiring more skilled IT professionals in the next six months.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (blueman), Fedora (nodejs), Gentoo (firefox), openSUSE (kleopatra), Oracle (java-1.8.0-openjdk), SUSE (apache2, binutils, firefox, pacemaker, sane-backends, spice, spice-gtk, tomcat, virt-bootstrap, xen, and zeromq), and Ubuntu (ca-certificates, mariadb-10.1, mariadb-10.3, netty, openjdk-8, openjdk-lts, perl, and tomcat6).
The Italian multinational energy giant Enel Group appears to have been hit by cyber criminals using the Windows NetWalker ransomware, and some screenshots of data stolen from the company has been posted on the dark web.
Honey is a popular browser extension built by the PayPal subsidiary Honey Science LLC. It promises nothing less than preventing you from wasting money on your online purchases. Whenever possible, it will automatically apply promo codes to your shopping cart, thus saving your money without you lifting a finger. And it even runs a reward program that will give you some money back! Sounds great, what’s the catch?
With such offers, the price you pay is usually your privacy. With Honey, it’s also security. The browser extension is highly reliant on instructions it receives from its server. I found at least four ways for this server to run arbitrary code on any website you visit. So the extension can mutate into spyware or malware at any time, for all users or only for a subset of them – without leaving any traces of the attack like a malicious extension release.
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In the end, I found that the Honey browser extension gives its server very far reaching privileges, but I did not find any evidence of these privileges being misused. So is it all fine and nothing to worry about? Unfortunately, it’s not that easy.
While the browser extension’s codebase is massive and I certainly didn’t see all of it, it’s possible to make definitive statements about the extension’s behavior. Unfortunately, the same isn’t true for a web server that one can only observe from outside. The fact that I only saw non-malicious responses doesn’t mean that it will stay the same way in future or that other people will make the same experience.
In fact, if the server were to invade users’ privacy or do something outright malicious, it would likely try to avoid detection. One common way is to only do it for accounts that accumulated a certain amount of history. As security researchers like me usually use fairly new accounts, they won’t notice anything. Also, the server might decide to limit such functionality to countries where litigation is less likely. So somebody like me living in Europe with its strict privacy laws won’t see anything, whereas US citizens would have all of their data extracted.
But let’s say that we really trust Honey Science LLC given its great track record. We even trust PayPal who happened to acquire Honey this year. Maybe they really only want to do the right thing, by any means possible. Even then there are still at least two scenarios for you to worry about.
The Honey server infrastructure makes an extremely lucrative target for hackers. Whoever manages to gain control of it will gain control of the browsing experience for all Honey users. They will be able to extract valuable data like credit card numbers, impersonate users (e.g. to commit ad fraud), take over users’ accounts (e.g. to demand ransom) and more. Now think again how much you trust Honey to keep hackers out.
But even if Honey had perfect security, they are also a US-based company. And that means that at any time a three letter agency can ask them for access, and they will have to grant it. That agency might be interested in a particular user, and Honey provides the perfect infrastructure for a targeted attack. Or the agency might want data from all users, something that they are also known to do occasionally. Honey can deliver that as well.
Two months after Panchanathan Subramaniam’s demise, his son S. Ramesh still grieves: “When we got him admitted to Thanjavur government hospital with symptoms of Covid-19, we never imagined we would take him back lifeless.”
More so since 68-year-old Subramaniam, who retired years ago from a clerical position in the Indian Army, had no major health complaints. He was proud of his association with the military “and took good care of his fitness. He never missed his daily walks and was strict about his diet,” explains Ramesh, 40, a native of Tamil Nadu’s Kumbakonam town. “Even while admitting him to hospital, we thought he would be cured.”
Côte d'Ivoire’s Alassane Ouattara is set to run for a controversial third presidential term on Saturday amid an opposition boycott and fears of post-election violence following a series of deadly clashes around the country between supporters of rival parties. Ouattara, who became president in 2011 and is popular among international donors, had previously ruled out standing for re-election, but reversed course in August after the sudden death from natural causes of the man he had primed to replace him. The main opposition parties consider the third term illegal, arguing that the country’s constitution limits presidents to two terms. But 78-year-old Ouattara claims a new constitution adopted by referendum in 2016 reset term limits, allowing him to run again. The opposition also questions the impartiality of the Ivoirien election commission and constitutional council, which validated Ouattara’s third term bid while rejecting 40 out of 44 rival applicants, including some of the president’s main challengers.
This Administration -- like the one before it -- isn't a fan of leaks or whistleblowing. This Administration seems to be leakier than most, possibly due to the Commander-in-Chief's vindictive shit-canning of anyone insufficiently deferential. When distrust abounds, the leaks will flow.
"Climate warming is awakening the 'sleeping giants' of the carbon cycle," warned one researcher.
On the same day in May 2019, the Army Corps of Engineers awarded a pair of contracts worth $788 million to replace 83 miles of fence along the southwest border.
The projects were slated to be completed in January 2020, the Corps said then. Four months into this year, however, the government increased the value of the contracts by more than $1 billion, without the benefit of competitive bidding designed to keep costs low to taxpayers.
"It is reasonable to infer that, in Trump's mind, Barrett must repay his appointment by refusing to recuse, and then by voting both to secure his election and to gut the Affordable Care Act," wrote one legal ethicist.€
Citing her "sworn duty to protect every voter and their right to cast the ballot free from intimidation and harassment," the Democratic secretary of state vows to appeal the judge's injunction.€
The grip grew tighter as I watched people I know and love denounce real journalism as “fake news,” all while embracing conspiracy theories like “Pizza Gate.”€ As the pressure built, the coronavirus acted as the metaphorical lid, slammed onto a pot that was already heating to a steady boil.€ Boil over it did, spilling all of our€ nation’s€ dirty secrets: racism, murder, violence, and widespread inequity in our educational institutions.€ Yet rather than lead the way, rather than turn down the heat, rather than ease the tension, the Trump administration gleefully fanned the flames of our divide.€ No justice was served, only very real wildfires began to consume the coastal states.€ Too many people had died who didn’t need to, too many… Trump’s embrace of the consuming chaos struck a note familiar, of the Batman’s arch nemesis Joker, of whom the wise Alfred accurately assessed stating€ “some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”€ € I began to feel crushed by the weight of it all.
Heavier still was this administration’s attack on the environment, which, as a wildlife advocate and lifelong animal lover, hit me, again, where it hurt.€ The agenda included rollbacks on the Endangered Species Act, rollbacks on the National Environmental Policy Act, and openly hostile cabinet appointments.€ There has been an ongoing assault on all of our natural resources that will take years to undo, if we can undo them at all.€ With Justice Ginsburg’s death, the Supreme Court is likely stacked against us. Then came a final kick while I was down, wolves will almost certainly be removed from the Endangered Species list, no longer receiving any federal protections once afforded to them.€ This blow landed right in the gut, opening the door for€ the€ mass€ slaughter€ of a familial animal, one€ I have revered since childhood.€ Like Game Thrones’ Young Wolf, Robb Stark, it felt like this€ story wouldn’t have a happy ending for me,€ or the wolves.€ Yet, it was€ after this cumulative€ loss,€ after this€ dark€ moment of deep despair, that I remembered.€ It€ was Batman who rose from the Pit to defeat Bane, and€ it was€ John Snow€ who€ rose from the dead to save Westeros.
As US unemployment claims rise, rent evictions accelerate, food lines grow, the prospect of a fiscal stimulus bill in Congress fades, and as a third Covid 19 wave creates record level infections & hospitalizations, each deterioration has begun reinforcing the other.
Potentially exacerbating all the above, political instability and conflict of historic dimensions is around the corner. And the Barrett confirmation today, October 26, 2020 will put the US Supreme Court at the center of this dynamic.
A demand for a grace period needs to start now to build up powerful support from a multi-partisan combination of national, state, and local candidates for public office.
Donald Trump isn’t just inside the heads of his Trumpster base; he’s long been a consuming obsession among those yearning for his defeat in November. With barely more than a week to go before the election of our lifetime, those given to nail biting as a response to anxiety have by now gnawed ours down to the quick. And many have found other ways to manage (or mismanage) their apprehensions through compulsive rituals, which only ratchet up the angst of the moment, among them nonstop poll tracking, endless “what if” doomsday-scenario conversations with friends, and repeated refrigerator raids.
Late on Friday news came out that Facebook had sent a cease and desist letter to researchers at NYU working on the Ad Observatory project. At issue was that the project had asked people to install a browser extension that would share data back to NYU regarding what ads they saw. Facebook -- responding to significant criticism -- has put forth an ad library that allows researchers to search through what ads are being shown on Facebook and who is behind them (which is good transparency!), but it does not show how those ads were targeted. This is what the researchers at NYU were trying to collect data on. And that is a reasonable research goal.
Support independent cartooning: join€ Sparky’s List—and don’t forget to visit TT’s€ Emporium of Fun, featuring the new book and plush Sparky!
If Trump refuses to step down, we must be ready to not cooperate.
Results of the season’s legal battles over voting rules are now ready to tally up. It’s a mixed bag, with Republicans winning late decisions over the forms of mail-in ballots, state witness requirements and the always controversial naked ballot and double-envelope rules; Democrats have largely prevailed in winning longer mail-in counting periods. Contests over drop-in boxes for mail-in ballots turned ugly, with only one allotted for the whole of Harris County, Texas, which is as large as Rhode Island.
Perhaps the most consequential decision was the U.S. Supreme Court’s tie vote which for now lets stand a three-day extension for mail-in balloting in Pennsylvania. That could have a real impact on a swing-state’s result. In Supreme Court world, a four-four tie goes the runner, this time the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, dominated by Democrats.
"He wants to throw out legal votes. That's what he's saying here."
Civics books tell us the winners of elections are announced after all the votes are cast and counted.
When she talks about her music, the Welsh artist Kelly Lee Owens often invokes her experience training as an auxiliary nurse at a lung cancer ward in Manchester, England, as a teenager. Her patients were the ones who encouraged her to pursue the creative path she’s on now. “They were kind of like my career advisers,” she told The Guardian. “They had this unique perspective, of having their lives threatened by something out of their control, so I respected all of their words of advice.”
The ongoing struggle for racial justice. The future for immigrant families. The health and well-being of all Americans. The very fate of our fragile planet. The United States faces a crossroads in this year’s elections. Seeking out the stories flying under the national radar, The Nation and Magnum Foundation are partnering on What’s At Stake, a series of photo essays from across the country through the lenses of independent imagemakers. Follow the whole series here. This installment was produced with support from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
On a warm afternoon in October, the leaves were beginning to change color and the sun shed a warm, golden hue across the vast landscape in Northeastern Montana. Lance Fourstar and Angeline Cheek, community organizers and activists from Fort Peck Indian Reservation, weaved their way through bumpy and rugged terrain in a dark green Ford crew cab, having driven through this land countless times before. They were headed to the Missouri River, where a large, controversial infrastructure project is planned that will cut through just south of the reservation.
Hariri was once again nominated by Lebanon’s ruling establishment Thursday, pledging to form a new government months after failure to quickly name a new prime minister ensued after deadlock and political instability pressured the seven month old cabinet of previous prime minister Hassan Diab to resign.
Hariri, inheriting the same economic regime initiated by his father, Rafic, who oversaw the deregulated real estate development transformation of Beirut through his company, Solidere, that essentially turned the city into his clan’s privatization venture, became the face of corruption and nepotism in Lebanon for very good reasons.
Now the FTC will have to decide whether to file a petition for writ of certiorari (request for Supreme Court review). It's quite possible that the FTC's 3-2 majority in favor of the petition for a Ninth Circuit rehearing (consisting of the Republican chairman and the two Democratic commissioners) would also authorize a cert petition. But six of the nine justices are conservatives, three of whom were nominated by President Trump, and they would see that the Trump Administration backed Qualcomm in this dispute. They would likely also take note of the fact that two of the three judges on the Ninth Circuit panel were conservatives (and the third was a relatively conservative-leaning Democrat). But the Supreme Court also has a history of fixing issues with the patent system, particularly with the overleveraging of patents and the patentee overcompensation it leads to. That is not a partisan question, though antitrust law often is. I remember Senator Klobuchar (D-Minn.) lamenting the Supreme Court's restrictive application of the Sherman Act in a statement she made at Justice Barrett's confirmation hearing.
St. Jude Medical failed to show that challenged claims of patent owned by Snyders had been anticipated by other patents, nor did it prove that a particular combination demonstrated obviousness.
Claims of a patent directed to an artificial heart valve manufactured by Snyders Heart Valve LLC and a system for inserting the valve were not proven unpatentable by St. Jude Medical in either of two inter partes review proceedings, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit found. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board correctly found that St. Jude did not prove that the design and the materials used in the artificial heart valve were anticipated by other patents or that the device was unpatentable due to obviousness. However, the Board erred in finding that four of the challenged claims were unpatentable as anticipated by a prior art patent (St. Jude Medical, LLC v. Snyders Heart Valve LLC, October 15, 2020, Taranto, G.).
One step up and two steps back.
Early last month I cheered a "spectacular turnaround" in the German patent reform process as the Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection had made substantial changes to its proposal for a new patent injunction statute as compared to its first draft, which was published in January and amounted to a non-reform proposal. And a few weeks ago I reported on Germany's most prominent (though not most powerful) patent judge's interpretation of the reform statute. Today, Chancellor Merkel's cabinet adopted a slightly revised version of the statute (PDF, in German), which will now be reviewed and commented on by the Federal Council (the legislative body that consists of the governments of the country's federal states, though the Bundesrat's role will realistically just be consultative in nature in this case, while the actual decision will be in the hands of the Federal Parliament, the Bundestag). It remains to be seen what text the legislature will ultimately adopt--if any, given that the end of the term is approaching fast.
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Given how the German patent judiciary works, it would take something more forceful to bring about major change. The current proposal would create an opportunity for law firms to charge their clients for a lot of additional time spent on proportionality arguments. But the leverage that patent holders will have in negotiations would be roughly the same as before--provided they bypass Dusseldorf to be on the safe side. The statute would be suboptimal, but a huge improvement over the January draft, if--and that "if" is the largest part of the problem--the legislative rationale didn't continue to endorse the Federal Court of Justice's case law. And the patent-specialized division of that court is to German patent law what the Central Committee of the Communist Party was to the Soviet Union in the decades prior to Gorbachev's reforms.
If you noticed the allusion to a band name in the headline, you might have grown up in the 80s, in which case you may also remember the famous line "I pity the fool." Otherwise you might know the proverb "curiosity killed the cat". Whatever, those opposing German patent injunction reform are now on the winning track as I explained in my previous post, and in the losing camp, three companies are particularly responsible for a monumental f..kup:
Google, SAP, and Daimler.
Volkswagen deserves credit for having started the push for patent injunction reform in Germany. The three companies listed above will go down in history as the main culprits unless there's a second reversal of fortune. I'd like things to work out, but I increasingly doubt it. The anti-reform movement is just too sophisticated for a pathetic bunch of amateurs.
The documents that prove what went wrong and who's to blame are all public. So let me explain, but again, I'd like nothing more than to be proven to have been too pessimistic. Until the last moment I'll hope that the broken German patent litigation system will be fixed.
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It was an utter stupidity at any rate to use a term that simply isn't a well-defined legal term. I can't remember ever having seen a German statute that contained the word. Therefore, the first thing courts will turn to when trying to make sense of the term is, besides the context, what the legislative rationale (the official commentary provided along with the law) says. I'll get to those two determinants--context and legislative rationale--in a moment.
Anyway, if the plan is to inject a new term into the law that wasn't there before, a lobby group (unless someone inside the group seeks to sabotage the effort or people don't know what they're talking about) would at least pick a term that has framing value. You'd want to use a term that has a connotation that suits your agenda. The last thing you'd want to do is shoot yourself in the foot like ip2innovate did.
