In 2021, there are more reasons why people love Linux than ever before. In this series, I'll share 21 different reasons to use Linux. Today, I'll talk about what makes packaging for Linux ideal for programmers.
Programmers love to program. That probably seems like an obvious statement, but it's important to understand that developing software involves a lot more than just writing code. It includes compiling, documentation, source code management, install scripts, configuration defaults, support files, delivery format, and more. Getting from a blank screen to a deliverable software installer requires much more than just programming, but most programmers would rather program than package.
This has been an interesting week for Linux news and releases, as we saw the launch of the highly anticipated Linux 5.11 kernel series, the re-release of the Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS desktop ISO images due to a bug in the OEM install, as well as the final release of the OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 distro and KDE Frameworks 5.79 software suite.
I consider this a slow news week, so I had some time to take a first look at GNOME 40’s new design changes in the upcoming Fedora 34 distro, compile a top 10 of the best alternatives to Raspberry Pi OS, review Manjaro Linux ARM on the Raspberry Pi 4, and show you how to connect your Linux laptop to an external monitor via HDMI.
Hello and welcome to this week's Linux Roundup.
We had a full week in the week of Linux Releases with Ubuntu 20.04.2 and OpenMandriva 4.2.
Frequently I see people throwing around the terms feature complete and abandoned software without much thought about what would really define something as fitting into those categories. So today I'm going to be overly pedantic and try to narrow it down to a definition I'm happy with.
On this episode of This Week in Linux, we’ve got a lot of App News this week with the latest release of Lightworks video editor, Shutter screen capture project has returned, we’ve got updates about OBS Studio on Wayland and we’ll celebrate 20 Years of VLC. System76 announced a new project that will give people a chance to win a Thelio desktop. A 24 year old bug was found in the Linux Kernel and instead of the usual oh no! kind of scenario, this is more a testament to open source. Then we’ll talk about some upcoming changes to the email client space on the Linux Desktop with some announcements from Mailspring. All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!
Listener feedback, and an email about some blog posts about CentOS.
Nothing unexpected or particularly scary happened this week, so here we are - with 5.11 tagged and pushed out.
In fact, it's a smaller-than-average set of commits from rc7 to final, which makes me happy. And I already have several pull requests lined up for tomorrow, so we're all set for the merge window to start.
But in the meantime - and yes, I know it's Valentine's Day here in the US - maybe give this release a good testing before you go back and play with development kernels. All right? Because I'm sure your SO will understand.
Linus
After being in development for the past seven weeks, Linux kernel 5.11 is finally here as the latest and greatest kernel series for GNU/Linux distributions and anyone else out there who wants to have the best possible hardware support on their machines.
Highlights of Linux kernel 5.11 include Intel SGX (Software Guard Extensions) support, a new system-call interception mechanism, support for task-local storage in the BPF subsystem, suspend-to-idle support in user-mode, big block mode support in the virtio-mem mechanism, and support for contiguous memory allocator in the RISC-V architecture.
What better way for open-source enthusiasts to celebrate Valentine's Day than with the stable release of the Linux 5.11 kernel... Linus Torvalds even changed the kernel codename for the occasion to being the "Valentine's Day Edition" kernel.
While there were a fair number of changes merged this past week, Linus still went ahead today and released Linux 5.11 rather than going into overtime by releasing Linux 5.11-rc8. Included as part of this week's fixes was the all important CPUfreq change to address the AMD performance regression. Now not only is AMD Zen 2/3 laptops/desktops/servers recovered from that regression but often performing faster than prior kernel series.
Linus has released the 5.11 kernel, as expected. "I know it's Valentine's Day here in the US - maybe give this release a good testing before you go back and play with development kernels. All right? Because I'm sure your SO will understand." Headline features in 5.11 include Intel SGX support, a new system-call interception mechanism, the seccomp() constant-action bitmap optimization, the internal kmap_local() API, the epoll_pwait2() system call, and much more. See the LWN merge-window articles (part 1, part 2) and the (under development) KernelNewbies 5.11 page for more information.
“Most hybrid kernels start as monolithic kernels and begin moving components into user land, primarily as security to support 3rd-party components and drivers which may be malicious or buggy.
An example of a hybrid kernel design may keep the VFS and bus controllers inside the kernel, but have the file system drivers and storage drivers as user mode programs. The advantage of this system that is you keep the performance and design principles of a monolithic kernel, but you allow untrusted users to load untrusted code for accessing their own storage devices.” (src)
“XNU is a hybrid kernel, containing features of both monolithic kernels and microkernels, attempting to make the best use of both technologies, such as the message passing ability of microkernels enabling greater modularity and larger portions of the OS to benefit from memory protection, and retaining the speed of monolithic kernels for some critical tasks.
In this video, we are looking at how to upgrade to LibreOffice 7 on Linux Mint 20.1.
In this article, We will let you through how to install the Linux operating system and have a feel for the process of using the Linux operating system. We will explain the installation process of the Ubuntu Linux server edition. This is open-source and free to use. Whether you will use Ubuntu for commercial or personal use, there will be no charges. Google and open up the website of Ubuntu and download the ISO file to install the Ubuntu server edition. Burn the file on a disk or load it up on a USB thumb drive. We hope you already know about the burning processor making bootable thumb drive.
Since it is a server edition, there will be no graphical user interface on your screen. You will see a line user interface, which in simple words means a black-and-white screen. There will be a blinking cursor on your screen. You have to write commands to move further with your work, or you will be stuck. Let me answer the question that is popping up in your heads as to why the screen is black and white in the Linux operating system’s server edition. The biggest reason is safety. The server version of the Linux operating system has a line user interface because every function is like an attack vector for a black hat hacker. Any program that you install on your computer’s graphical interface gives a hacker a loophole to enter your system. As there is no graphical interface or external apps in the Linux operating system, the threat of hacking attacks is minimum.
VMware Workstation Player is a desktop virtualization software that allows you to run multiple, isolated operating systems on a single machine.
With VMware Player, you can create and run your own virtual machines and evaluate software distributed as a virtual appliance from many software vendors available from VMware’s Solution Exchange .
VMware Player is not open-source, and it is free only for personal non-commercial use. If you are looking for an open-source virtualization platform, you should try Oracle’s VirtualBox .
Today we are looking at how to install Harrison Mixbus on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
The vi editor has been around since the mid 1970’s. It is still the most widely used text editor on UNIX/Linux systems. In the early nineties vim (vi improved) was released as a clone for vi with additional improvements. With an abundance pf plugins and the ability to use external programs to further expand it’s capability, there seemingly unlimited potential. In this Linux quick tip we will be discussing how to format a json object in vim.
Many times we need to disable some keys, for example, recently I need to turn off the function of the Super key in Ubuntu while activating firefox kiosk mode. In a similar way, you may also have some situations where you want to do the same.
One of the most important tasks of the system administrators and IT professionals is to know about the system platform. If you want to install and run the new application on your system it's better to check whether the application is compatible with a 32 bit or 64-bit operating system. This article describes how to find out whether the installed Linux OS is 32 bit or 64 bit.
In this article, I have presented five simple ways to verify your Linux OS type. No matter whether you are using GUI or CLI-based systems, these commands work on almost all Linux operating systems including CentOS, Fedora, Redhat, Debian, Ubuntu, Mint etc.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install phpMyAdmin on Manjaro 20. For those of you who didn’t know, phpMyAdmin is a graphical MySQL/MariaDB administration tool that can be used to create, edit and delete databases. phpMyAdmin provides the most useful functions to interact with the MySQL database.
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 phpMyAdmin on a Manjaro 20 (Nibia).
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install LAMP on Manjaro 20. For those of you who didn’t know, LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL/MariaDB, and PHP or Perl or Python. All components are free and open-source software, and the combination is suitable for building dynamic web pages. The LAMP stack is one of the most popular server configurations in the world.
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 LAMP Stack on a Manjaro 20 (Nibia).
What if you could block connections to your network in real-time from countries around the world such as Russia, China and Brazil where the majority of cyberattacks originate? What if you could redirect connections to a single network based on their origin? As you can imagine, being able to control these things would reduce the number of attack vectors on your network, improving its security. You may be surprised that this is not only possible, but straightforward and easy, by implementing geographic filtering on your nftables firewall with Geolocation for nftables.
Despite some severe bugs in sudo, it remains the defacto tool to gain root shell or run command as another user on Linux, macOS, and Unix-like systems. The sudo command allows the system administrator to grant an individual user access to unprivileged commands. For instance, I can give developers the ability to restart the Apache webserver or PHP/Python process on a Linux server. Let us see how to remind developers and unprivileged users about the power of sudo for fun and profit. In this quick tip, I will show you how to add some spice to your sudo session with a lecture file on Linux or Unix.
We are going to deploy mikrotik-exporter to visualise Prometheus monitoring data for Mikrotik.
The proposed pocket is tha dangerzone here. The way I understand it, software which has been updated, lands in the proposed pocket before it lands in updates. This is so the person reporting a bug, or experiencing an issue, can install the update before it goes to the wider public userbase. If they report it works (via the Stable Release Updates (SRU) process) then it may migrate from proposed to updates and that update phases out to the userbase. The thing about proposed is that it’s inherently untested, that’s the point of it.
The proposed pocket can also be used as a staging area. If there’s a bunch of packages which need to land together, but take a long time to prepare and compile, they can be staged in proposed. Then, when ready, they can en-masse be copied to the updates pocket together. This prevents “archive skew” and unresolvable dependencies when these large changes occur.
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Today I am running Ubuntu Hirsute and foolishly enabled the proposed pocket. This pulled in an untested release of a critical package. Good work, popey! So I had to faff about a bit to debug and fix it. The reason I enabled the pocket was to get an early look at kernel 5.10 on Ubuntu Hirsute. My system seems to behave badly on 5.8, so I thought as 5.10 was “on the way” I could grab it. However, the stupid thing was, I added proposed (because that’s where 5.10 is baking) and upgraded all packages. Not just the kernel. Silly me.
The wine team released its new development version 6.2
As you know Wine is an application used to run windows applications on Non-Windows Operating systems such as Linux, FreeBSD, and macOS.
This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install wine 6.2 in Ubuntu 20.10, Ubuntu 20.04, Fedora 33, and Linux Mint 20.1.
Do you use Ubuntu and want to resize a partition on your computer and make it larger or smaller? Can’t quite figure out the right way to do it? If so, this guide is for you! Follow along as we go over how to resize a partition in Ubuntu!
Here's how I set up a media PC using Kodi (formerly XMBC) and a Raspberry Pi 4.
Shutter is a free, open-source, and feature-rich screenshot program available for Linux systems. It is developed using Perl and allows users to take screenshots of a specific area, window, your whole screen, or even of a website.
Additionally, Shutter gives you an option of applying various effects on the images taken, like drawing/highlighting a feature or point and uploading them to an image hosting website, all within a single window.
Undoubtedly the most useful feature of bash scripting is loop control. In any imperative programming language like bash, loop statements are commonly used along with conditional statements to perform repetitive tasks. In case of bash, three different types of loop statements are available: for, while and until. Each of these loop statements comes in handy in slightly different circumstances.
Yesterday, I wrote how you could verify packages using GPG stored in DNS. You may wonder how you can store it in DNS?
Within KDE we have a service called the binary factory. It’s a Jenkins driven build pipeline which we use in the KMyMoney project to build certain binary installable versions of the project. For the generation of our AppImage version we package all dependencies into a large tar file so that we don’t have to rebuild them every day.
Due to new versions of the online banking libraries we use, I updated some package information and let the service do its thing to create the tar file with the pre-build dependencies. This is usually a matter of a few hours. When I checked the progress after a while, I found out that the build had failed.
This quick beginner's guide explains the steps you need to install Java in Arch Linux and related distributions such as Manjaro.
It's been eighteen years since the game Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory was released while thanks to the it becoming open-source along with the id Tech 3 engine, it's still being advanced by the open-source community in 2021.
As we have covered before, the leading open-source project around Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (and one of the few remaining viable id Tech 3 community projects) is ET: Legacy. The ET: Legacy client/server remain compatible with the last of the official Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory releases while working on updating the engine for fixing bugs, security exploits, shifting to modern dependencies, graphics modernization work, and more. Ultimately they are still pursuing "Legacy" as their own mod with new features and improvements while preserving close to the original Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory gameplay.
It's been quite a while since we had a community chat post for Linux gaming, so let's get it going again: what have you been gaming on Linux lately?
There's so many games releasing all the time, along with cloud gaming very much being a thing that you can game across all sorts of Linux devices now. New isn't always better though of course and I often go back to the comfort of a few "safety" games that I know I will enjoy. Lately, that's been a likely unhealthy amount of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
Kate, KTextEditor and Co. did get a nice stream of updates in the first two weeks of February 2021.
I will just pick a few things I really liked, if you want to have a full overview, you can go through the list of all merged patches.
I have been looking into extending the coordinate-based timezone lookup system we have in KItinerary, in order to ready it for being moved to KDE Frameworks. The first step however is finding suitable boundary data files for this, next to the timezone ones.
I figure if we can write about “first quarter” of the year, then “first octant” also makes sense. So here’s the first six weeks of KDE-on-FreeBSD-in-2021 in a daemon-approved nutshell.
The kde@ team is a half-dozen people or so, some of whom are committers, some channel updates through Tobias or myself. The things I describe below are not my work, but our collective efforts over an octant.
Review and update the help documentation for a number of GNOME applications as tracked in https://wiki.gnome.org/DocumentationProject/Tasks/ApplicationHelp.
Even though GNOME is extremely user-friendly, it is a large and complex system, and thus, requires some learning to use to the fullest and to do so GNOME has provided some very useful documentation. This project proposed a review and updation of a number GNOME application Help documents. The status of these documents are tracked in the Application Help Wiki (https://wiki.gnome.org/DocumentationProject/Tasks/ApplicationHelp).
[...]
Currently, core projects like Boxes, Calculator and Contacts have been updated to GNOME 3.38 which was the target version of GNOME for the scope of GSoD. While most of the Merge Requests have been merged, some are still under review.
Along with that I am going to continue my work on updating documents for GNOME and my next task is updating Evince.
My search for new and interesting features in the Linux community took me to the DistroWatch waiting list this week where the Laxer OS project caught my attention. The project's website describes itself as follows: "A beautifully crafted GNU/Linux operating system based on Arch Linux."
Judging from the project's download archive, the distribution is updated every month or two. There is just one edition available which runs the GNOME desktop environment. Laxer OS runs on 64-bit (x86_64) machines exclusively and its ISO is 2GB in size. The project's website suggests the operating system will not only look good, but offer performance improvements: "You will notice the significant performance boost on the first boot of your system."
The website's description was a little vague on how performance and visual improvements were delivered so I decided to find out for myself. I downloaded the media for the project's 1.2 release and booted from it. This brings up a menu where we are given the chance to boot to a live desktop normally or with "speech". I believe the "speech" option runs a screen reader for people who are visually impaired. The live media boots to a graphical login screen where we are invited to sign in using an account called "liveuser" with no password.
Signing into the live session loads the GNOME desktop and automatically launches the Calamares installer. At the top of the screen we find a panel with an application menu and the GNOME Activities menu in the upper-left corner. To the right of the panel is the system tray. I noticed early on there was a lot of network activity happening when I first logged in. This appears to be an automated check for software updates as a minute later a notification appeared letting me know 132 packages were available to be upgraded.
The release of Kodi 19 is just around the corner and with it comes big changes that affects all media center hardware vendors. One of the most obvious changes, is the switch to Python3 (the programming language that is used by the Kodi add-ons) which is incompatible with the Python2 that was previously used. All add-ons have had to be updated to be compatible with Python3 so that they also work with Kodi 19, that has been completed successfully for many addons, but there are also many other add-ons that have not yet been updated, and therefore do not yet work with Kodi 19.
The second big change concerns the methods of playing videos done by each of the hardware vendors. In the past there was no cross-platform standard under Linux, so many adjustments and different approaches were necessary, for example “Raspberry Pi” so that it could be used with Kodi.
With the release of Kodi 19 – the standard video playback for Linux is used and the legacy techniques have been removed. This has required that the drivers support the standard on all of the hardware vendors that are supported by LibreELEC.
There has been a lot of attention on helloSystem this week as a macOS-inspired operating system built atop FreeBSD with an emphasis on providing a polished desktop experience. Since we highlighting the FOSDEM presentation about it, there has been a lot of coverage on helloSystem and this weekend marks a new experimental ISO release.
The helloSystem motto is being a "desktop system for creators with focus on simplicity, elegance, and usability. Based on FreeBSD. Less, but better!" The desktop utilities are written with PyQt5.
Recent noteworthy things commited to -current and not previously reported include: [...]
On this day February 14th, Debian joins the Free Software Foundation Europe in celebration of "I Love Free Software" day. This day takes the time to appreciate and applaud all those who contribute to the many areas of Free Software.
Debian sends all of our love and a giant “Thank you” to the upstream and downstream creators and maintainers, hosting providers, partners, and of course all of the Debian Developers and Contributors.
The debate over whether to include nonfree firmware in the Debian installer has emerged from the depths of the debian-devel mailing list under the title “Making Debian available.”
The gist of this extremely long e-mail thread (and Debian is a mailing list culture, despite attempts to pull it into the 21st century is that the Debian Project is hostile to new users because its standard install images do not include nonfree firmware, and installations on most laptops will go poorly because the Linux kernel and free firmware might not support their WiFi or display systems.
Images with nonfree firmware are available, but they are hard to find and aren’t linked on the main Debian web site.
Even a search for nonfree firmware on the Debian web site isn’t much help.A Google search for debian nonfree takes you right where you need to go.
I use the nonfree-firmware Debian images almost all the time. After my attempt at an in-place upgrade from Buster to Bullseye failed a week or so ago, I downloaded a nonfree image and used it to install Bullseye. I restored my user files from a backup (ALWAYS have a backup) and everything is now working.
I made a minor release of plocate; as usual, https://plocate.sesse.net/ has the tarballs and such.
Manjaro Linux ARM on the Raspberry Pi 4, where do I start? An amazing operating system for the Raspberry Pi computer, whether you want to use it just for fun or as a daily driver for your home office. Whoever did the Raspberry Pi port of Manjaro Linux ARM is a genius and knows what he’s doing.
Don’t be scared away by the first-time text-mode configuration, because this Arch Linux and needs to be properly installed on the microSD card of your Raspberry Pi before you can actually use the system.
An official PinePhone keyboard accessory is on the way. But some folks have been making their own DIY keyboard solutions for Pine64?s smartphone for a while.
One hardware hacker decided to do that by pairing a bit of new tech with something old? but classic.
In a pair of posts on reddit and imgur, /u/AdmiralSym explains how they took a salvaged Psion 5 PDA keyboard and repurposed it as a Bluetooth keyboard companion for the PinePhone.
The Psion Series 5 was a personal digital assistant released in 1997 which featured a 5.6 inch , 640 x 240 pixel widescreen grayscale LCD display, the EPOC32 operating system, and a clamshell-style design that allowed you to fold the device in half like a notebook.
For several months now, a small team at Mozilla has been exploring new ways of building a browser. We called that effort Tofino, and it’s now morphed into the Browser Futures Group.
As part of that, Nick Alexander and I have been working on a persistent embedded knowledge store called Project Mentat. Mentat is designed to ship in client applications, storing relational data on disk with a flexible schema.
It’s a little different to most of the storage systems you’re used to, so let’s start at the beginning and explain why. If you’re only interested in the what, skip down to just above the example code.
[...]
Nick has just finished porting Tofino’s User Agent Service to use Mentat for storage, which is an important milestone for us, and a bigger example of Mentat in use if you’re looking for one.
What’s next?
We’re hoping to learn some lessons. We think we’ve built a system that makes good tradeoffs: Mentat delivers schema flexibility with minimal boilerplate, and achieves similar query speeds to an application-specific normalized schema. Even the storage space overhead is acceptable.
I’m sure Tofino will push our performance boundaries, and we have a few ideas about how to exploit Mentat’s schema flexibility to help the rest of the Tofino team continue to move quickly. It’s exciting to have a solution that we feel strikes a good balance between storage rigor and real-world flexibility, and I can’t wait to see where else it’ll be a good fit.
Today on the "I Love Free Software Day" we want to celebrate and share our love for Free Software. With this special day we say thank you to all the Free Software friends who supported, developed, campaigned, translated and worked for Free Software. On 14 February, let us show our love and thank all those people involved in Free Software.
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For your listening pleasure we produced a new Software Freedom Podcast episode for this I love Free Software Day featuring Greg Farough, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Lyida Pintscher, Florian Effenberger, Miriam Ballhausen, Pamela Chestek and Polina Malaja. In this episode Matthias Kirschner and Bonnie Mehring talk about the background and the importance of the I Love Free Software Day for our community.
Today is ââ¬Å¾I love Free Software Day“. And I also love free software for many reasons. I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who contributes to free software. This happens in many different ways. Some write this software, some make sure that it is understandable, some bring this into the different languages, some support the use of the software and so on. They all contribute to making free software better.
On today's "I love Free Software Day" I would like to thank "PeterCXY" and others who contributed to shelter.
Until recently I have used two separate phones: one for the FSFE and one privately. The reason is that I prefer to have the ability to switch off the work phone when I do not want to be available for work but focus on my private life. After the FSFE phone did not get further security updates for a long time I was facing the decision: should I get a new phone for work -- but waste resources for the hardware -- or should I continue to use the old one with the known security issues?
In October 2019, I went to Linuxhotel in Essen, as I had been invited to attend that year’s General Assembly in the FSFE as a prospective member. I had a very enjoyable weekend, where I met new people and renewed older acquaintances, and it was confirmed to me what good and idealistic people are behind that important part of the European free software movement.
On the photo you see Momo, the character from Michael Ende’s eponymous novel – a statue which I was delighted to see, given that “Momo” has been one of my favorite children’s novels for decades.
I first met the concept of free software at the university, as a student of physics and computer science in the early nineties. As students, we had to work on the old proprietary SunOS and HP-UX systems; we had to use the Emacs editor and GNU C compiler (thanks, Richard Stallman and GNU team!) as well as the LaTeX text processing system (thanks, Donald Knuth and Leslie Lamport!)
Today we’re celebrating I love Free Software Day, where we say a big thank you to the developers and maintainers of free software projects around the world. You are awesome!
One such project is LibreOffice, of course – but what does “free software” actually mean?
Well, from a purely practical perspective, it means that you can get it without paying for it. That’s nice, but free software doesn’t come out of nowhere: certified developers in the LibreOffice ecosystem need funding to keep adding new features, and The Document Foundation (the non-profit that oversees LibreOffice) appreciates donations to manage the project, organise events and share knowledge.
C++ has multiple features which are designed to be simple expressions which the compiler expands to something less-convenient to write. Range-based for loops are a good example as they are a metaphor for an explicit loop with calls to begin and end among other things. Lambdas are another good example as they are a metaphor for a callable object. C++20 adds several more, including rewriting use of operator!=(...) to use !operator==(...) and operator<(...) to use the spaceship operator.
[I admit that in writing this blog post I searched for a metaphor for “a device which aids understanding by replacing the thing it describes with something more familiar” before realizing the recursion. I haven’t heard these features described as metaphorical before though…]
All of these metaphorical replacements can be explored in the Clang AST or on CPP Insights.
Matching these internal representations is confusing and can cause incorrect transformations. None of these internal representations are matchable in the new IgnoreUnlessSpelledInSource mode.
In the default matching mode, the CallExprs for begin and end are matched, as are the CXXRecordDecl implicit in the lambda and hidden comparisons within rewritten binary operators such as spaceship (causing bugs in clang-tidy checks).
PHP makes the easy things easy, and in the process makes the wrong things easy and the right things hard.
C makes the easy things hard, the hard things possible, and in the process makes the wrong things just as easy as the right things.
Rust makes everything hard, but the wrong things even harder.
For classification we use Information gain where as for Decision Tree Regression, we use Mean Squared Error. Check out this link for Decision Tree Regression hyper parameters tuning in Python.
We calculate for each parent and child, the mean squared error.
We choose a node which has least mean squared error. That becomes the root node.
Science fiction, known by its shorthand abbreviation sci-fi, has a deep link with the socialist project dating back to the days of the Second International. Alongside the typical literary osmosis that occurs when authors absorb radical politics of their contemporaries, there is a distinct history of the genre’s texts serving as an imaginative laboratory for socialist/communist prepositions and/or propositions. The epistemological horizon of utopia invites these experiments in the imagination, sometimes resulting in practical consequences. For instance, Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887, one of the foundational time travel texts in the genre, catalyzed the creation of an entire political movement of clubs seeking to nationalize the means of production, hence their nomenclature as Nationalist Clubs. This trend has amplified in the last 140 years (though Bellamy might have been horrified to see how many forecasts have instead served a different side of class struggle).
A persistent trend that amplified in this half-century period was the multi-media nature of the genre. Prior to 1970, there were niches within literature, film, television, and other visual art forms that fostered cottage industries. By contrast, in 2020, it was possible to look at multiple platforms and media types to see each contained sci-fi genres that not only were well-established but quantified as the largest financial successes in that given media form ever, case and point the Marvel Comics Cinematic Universe and the Star Wars franchises ranking as the two highest-grossing film series in worldwide box office history. Video games, popular music, comic books, collectible statuary, fashion, children’s toys, and many more forms of art now have distinct and prominent sci-fi artistic expressions. An entire cable television channel, SyFy, launched in September 1992 as the Sci-Fi Channel, remains a programming staple nationwide and has generated its own award-winning media. While a historical survey of the first half of the century describes a niche audience, this period describes a major centrifuge of capital accumulation within an increasingly-consolidated and deregulated multimedia market system.
If there is a word to describe the France-born Parker, it is overachiever. Even if you are not a pro basketball fan, that is an admirable quality.
The film traces his life from childhood to adulthood as a basketball player, beginning in France and wrapping up in the USA. Parker’s grit propelled him to be an integral part of the Spurs’ four-championship dynasty.
If there is a word to describe the France-born Parker, it is overachiever. Even if you are not a pro basketball fan, that is an admirable quality.
The film traces his life from€ childhood to adulthood€ as a basketball player, beginning in France and wrapping up in the € USA. Parker’s grit propelled him to be an integral part of the Spurs’ four-championship dynasty.
Commell unveiled “LP-179” Pico-ITX and “LV-6712” Mini-ITX boards with Intel 11th Gen CPUs plus 2.5GbE ports and up to quad displays. Meanwhile, Aaeon has revealed some more details on its Tiger Lake based “PICO-TGU4” SBC.
Commell announced two SBCs built around Intel’s 11th Gen Tiger Lake ULP3 processors. The LP-179 is the first Pico-ITX form-factor Tiger Lake SBC that we have seen, although Aaeon has just posted some preliminary specs and images for a PICO-TGU4 Pico-ITX board that we summarize farther below. The LV-6712 joins 11th Gen Mini-ITX boards previously announced by ASRock and IEI.
"This action by Amazon is nothing more than a sad attempt to distract from the facts and shirk accountability for its failures to protect hardworking employees from a deadly virus."
Wondering how to use Signal on your laptop or PC? If you have a Signal account, the popular messaging app will let you sync your account between your phone and your laptop or PC with a few easy steps. Signal is increasingly becoming popular as an instant messaging alternative to WhatsApp. It lets you send and receive text messages as well as make and receive voice and video calls. It has also grabbed attention for its enhanced security that comes from the open-source Signal Protocol. Signal also offers privacy features such as disappearing messages, screen security, and registration lock.
All these features make Signal complete against the likes of WhatsApp and Telegram. Signal, in fact, claims that all messaging that you access on your laptop or PC is private.
On its website, the German Ministry of Defence gives the impression that the mass production of an EU combat drone has already been decided. First, however, the Bundestag is to vote on it. The Social Democratic Party is thus faced with a decision of great consequence.
In the spotlight ever since a philosophy teacher who paid homage to Samuel Paty must now live under police protection, the French city of Trappes is a laboratory for understanding how thirty years of multicultural ideology in the suburbs does not lead to cultural enrichment, but to the death of Western culture. The weekly Valeurs Actuelles gives us a glimpse of life in Trappes.
Women who use their voice unashamedly become “a direct threat to patriarchy and misogynists”, said British television personality Saira Khan in a post on her Instagram, days after receiving threats for being an independent woman.
Saira Khan spoke of violence against women, as well as how she was a women “saying ‘I want to live my life on my terms'”. Her Instagram post carried a poem called “Anticlockwise” by feminist Pakistani poet Kishwar Naheed in light of the intimidation and threats she got for speaking about her beliefs in the United Kingdom.
Note: My book While Europe Slept was first published by Doubleday in 2006. Now the Stapis publishing house has put out a Polish edition, translated by Tadeusz Skrzyszowski. Given that the book is fifteen years old, Stapis asked for a new preface. Here it is.
A new IPS briefing paper highlights the unique role of tax policy in wealth concentration.
Democrats need to stop playing games and use their majorities to pass a $15 minimum wage right now—we can't wait any longer.
With millions of deaths, unemployment soaring, millions threatened with losing their homes and economies struggling around the world, the world’s billionaires are doing fine. More than fine. So fine that they have added trillions of dollars to their composite wealth.
In other words, capitalism as usual. Or even better than usual, depending on your point of view and bank account.
The anti-boycott laws are the ultimate in cancel culture. They are also un-American.
"Trump wanted those storming the Capitol to keep him in power. There is no ifs or buts about it," said Rep. Ilhan Omar.
"As evidence of Trump's behind-the-scenes sociopathy mounts, it becomes clearer that Dems must call witnesses."
"Three months after the election, and 61 court decisions later, Trump and his attorneys still refuse to acknowledge that he lost the election."
Every member of the United States Senate swears an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” and makes a commitment to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” After the House of Representatives impeached Donald Trump for the incitement of insurrection that resulted in the deadly January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol of the United States, the duty of true faith and allegiance to the Constitution demanded that senators try and convict the 45th president for the high crimes he committed.
Nothing exposed Republican duplicity over Donald Trump’s role in the January 6 violence like the unanimous support for awarding a congressional Medal of Honor to heroic Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman. At the end of a long day of impeachment trial lies, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell joined top Democrat Chuck Schumer in hailing Goodman’s bravery defending their colleagues on that bloody day, when both men had reason to fear for their lives.
"It is disappointing but not at all surprising that Trump's worst enablers will stand with him."
Politicians fear the disruptive power of a mobilized base, even when it helps them succeed.
"The Republican senators who voted to acquit are cowards and fascists, and that is all their party stands for today," said Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.).
"This is retreat. White flag. Malpractice. Completely unstrategic."
Ms. Butler’s disclosing a conversation with House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) proving President Trump’s endorsement of his mob’s resort to lethal force and violence to unconstitutionally prevent a peaceful transfer of presidential power precipitated a surprise 55-45 Senate vote this morning, including several Republicans, to entertain live witnesses. Democratic Senator Benjamin Cardin (Maryland) appeared on NPR shortly before the Senate reconvened from a recess at 12:30 pm. The Senator declared that the impeachment trial would be continued for two weeks; and, that the only issue remaining for resolution between the prosecution and defense (then in private negotiations) was whether five witnesses for each side would be named or left open for later identification in a Senate witness resolution.
Mr. Cardin was clueless of the Democratic capitulation, snaring defeat from the jaws of victory. The House Managers and Mr. Trump’s defense team agreed to a stipulation to admit into the record a mere written statement by Congresswoman Butler, not delivered in person under oath or via a deposition. Not a single witness would be called.
The point of the impeachment trial is to determine how history will remember Trump's anti-democratic presidency as well as the party that supported him—and media's framing today will have a powerful influence on that eventual verdict.
Iowa’s family farmers are working harder than ever during this deadly pandemic. We’re trying to keep our families and communities safe. We’re collaborating with our neighbors, and we’re finding innovative solutions to the problems we face.
With the time for changes to be made to the news media code rapidly running out, Google, one of the digital platforms that will be affected, has turned to a Fox News-style tactic: using the "some people are saying" line to draw attention to what are claimed issues with the Code.
The Tibetan community in exile residing in Dharamshala and all around the world surely must be celebrating this day, February 13, as their independence day, the anniversary of the five-point proclamation issued by the 13th Dalai Lama in 1913.
The social media has been flooded with messages wishing the peaceful autonomous region on this important day despite the illegal occupation of China that dates back to nearly six decades. But among all, an interesting message by former West Indies cricket legend Vivian Richards on Saturday, lending support to Tibet's freedom movement, has created a buzz on the internet.
"Happy Independence Day, Tibet" Way To Go #FreedomForTibet," the message from Richard's twitter account read.
The new hearing in the trial of Assyrian monk, Fr Sefer (Aho) Bileçen, was held today at the High Criminal Court in Mardin. As in the previous hearing in early November, proceedings were held in camera with no journalists allowed.
Fr Sefer faces terrorism charges. Prosecutors accuse him of aiding a member of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which is outlawed in Turkey, by giving a piece of bread (story). The PKK leader, Abdullah Ãâcalan, has been in prison since 1999.
Turkey’s heavy-handedness in promoting pan-Turkish views in the region causes disdain for activity that allows for any other narrative. Promotion of the Greek language is viewed as a threat to their Turkish identity, and further linking the Greek language to Christianity prompts harsh backlash. Christians are often viewed as “indigenous foreigners” as cited in ICC’s joint report on Turkey. With a strong Turkish community in Greece’s Thrace region, Turkey closely monitors any perceived threats to its people and dominance.
Twitter on Tuesday said it is seeking formal dialogue with the Information Technology Minister after the government ordered it to take down 1,178 accounts for allegedly spreading misinformation around farmers' protests.
The microblogging platform also noted that safety of its employees is a Ãâtop priority.
British television channel BBC World News has been barred from airing in China, the National Radio and Television Administration said on Friday, a week after Britain’s media regulator revoked Chinese state television’s broadcast licence.
In a statement issued on the stroke of the Lunar New Year, the administration said an investigation found BBC World News’ China-related reports had “seriously violated” regulations, including that news should be “truthful and fair,” had harmed China’s national interests and undermined national unity.
The channel therefore does not meet requirements for foreign channels broadcasting in China and its application to air for another year will not be accepted, it added.
Summary: Different platforms have different rules regarding “adult” content, but they often prove difficult to enforce. Even the US judicial system has declared that there is no easy way to define pornography, leading to Justice Potter Stewart’s famous line, “I know it when I see it.”
The following is the Copia Institute's submission to the Oversight Board as it evaluates Facebook's decision to remove some of Trump's posts and his ability to post. While addressed to the Board, it's written for everyone thinking about how platforms moderate content.
It's easy to dislike and distrust Julian Assange. He's done many things to inspire both reactions. Still, it's important to separate out personal feelings towards the guy with the question of whether or not he broke US law with publishing the things he did via Wikileaks. For years, the Obama DOJ refused to indict him, in part due to the recognition that nearly all of Assange's activities were similar to the kinds of things that journalists do all the time. The Trump DOJ had no such restraint (even as some prosecutors warned of problems with the idea), and as we and others have pointed out the indictment is a huge threat to investigative journalism and things like source protection.
Workers' organizations call on working people to support Biden's plan to create a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented workers and further demand Biden support equal rights for all workers to organize to strengthen workers unity.
Police have been accused of failing a grooming gang victim after bringing no charges in seven years - and losing 30 hours of her interview tapes.
Women in Kuwait are defying conservative norms and a culture of "shame" to speak out against harassment for the first time, in a social media campaign sparked by a popular fashion blogger.
Dozens of testimonies about being stalked, harassed or assaulted have emerged online, focused on the Instagram account "Lan Asket" - Arabic for "I will not be silent".
The rise in domestic violence has highlighted the limited legal and financial support available for victims who often find themselves trapped in abusive households due to conservative sharia social norms that consider it shameful for women to leave or seek justice.
If, however, Isabel Franco (pictured above) had been inclined to be honest, she would have plenty to apologize for. The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS, the first and only comprehensive history of the 1,400-year jihad phenomenon worldwide in the English language, shows that Muslim Spain was anything but a model of multiculturalism and coexistence. In fact, it was miserable to live as a Christian there. Christians could never be sure that they would not be harassed. One contemporary account tells of priests being “pelted with rocks and dung” by Muslims while on the way to a cemetery. The dhimmis suffered severe economic hardship: Paul Alvarus, a ninth century Christian in Córdoba, complained about the “unbearable tax” that Muslims levied on Christians.
Nor could Christians say anything about their situation, because that situation was mandated by Islamic law, and criticizing Islam, Muhammad, or the Qur’an in any manner was a death-penalty offense.
Rocky: Sil, you have so much wisdom to share with the world. I’d like to ask you some questions about the racism you experience here in Portland because I think it would help Americans to self-reflect on how we got here societally. One thing I don’t know a lot about you is how you got here to Portland. You were born in Kentucky, right?
Sil: I was born in Kentucky in the 50’s. Kentucky is a boor state, which means it was neutral in the Civil War. In Kentucky, they do racism with civility, very similar to Portland actually. That’s where you put the sweet candy coating on top, but you still have that solid center. I got to Portland after all the engineering schools in California were impacted and I was unable to get access to school there.
"It remains a legal and moral imperative that the U.S. government abide by national and international refugee law and provide these individuals with an opportunity to request asylum."
Leaving the Northern Territory’s Charles Darwin University, by Jeep, Jean-Baptiste and Charles learned first hand about the tall poppy thing when a cabal of tertiary students saluted their departure together with a raspberry comment. “Poofters!” one of them yelled, but their backs were turned by the time Jean-Baptiste, on precious loan from the Sorbonne, took umbrage at such la haine remark. He knew what a poofter was — they had a similar observation in Paris: Egalitarians there would yell out “Boofter!”€ They never let up on the Marie Antoinette jokes, which were about as funny as Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. As they drove off, another miscreant regionally nasalled, “Brokeback Mountain, mate,” and made a giddy-up click-click sound with his tongue. Again, Jean-Baptiste turned instantly, looking for eye contact to duel with — but, again, nothing.
Charles laughed. And squeezed Larmarck’s knee.€ “Don’t worry about them, J-B,” they went from ship mates to mateship in one generation. Jean-Baptiste moved Charles’s hand toward his crotch, at which point Charles gave up his larrikin larf and pulled his hand away. They were men, not to be trifled with by Falstaffian bawdiness.
European Union Parliamentarians have strongly backed India and South Africa's joint proposal at the World Trade Organization for a waiver on intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccine patents.
As many as 14 members of European Parliamentarians in a letter to EU leadership have called for a moratorium on the suspension of COVID-19 vaccine patents.
The two-page letter on COVID-19 vaccine highlights: "South Africa and India sent a joint proposal to the World Trade Organization requesting an exemption from patents and other intellectual property rights concerning drugs, vaccines, diagnostics, personal protective equipment, and other medical technologies throughout the pandemic and this proposal is still pending."
Apple is being sued in a patent dispute by Gesture Technology Partners for allegedly violating five patents related to mobile phone cameras with its Face ID biometrics, according to a report by AppleInsider.
The suit has been filed in the Western District of Texas, which has been identified as the newly-favored jurisdiction for non-practicing entities (or ‘patent trolls’) by industry organization Patent Progress.
With the completion of its initial studies, Core One's subsidiary has assembled the necessary data from its research and development program on biosynthetic psilocybin production systems in order to commence the process of preparing and filing its first patent application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
[...]
The Company's research team is continuing to develop new strategies to optimize expression of its proprietary DNA expression system that encodes the enzymes responsible for native psilocybin production in psychedelic mushrooms.
These comments were presented at the Federalist Society's 2020 National Lawyers Convention at the panel titled "Intellectual Property Rights and the Rule of Law". They address a trending narrative that casts opposition to the demands of patent holders as a form of lawlessness. This narrative specifically takes aim at a practice that has been termed “efficient infringement” – the idea that a firm may rationally decide to infringe patents either because it will be too costly for the patent holder to enforce its rights in court, or because it is happy to take its chances in court, where an asserted patent may be invalidated and where damages eventually assessed against the infringer years later will likely be no higher than the royalties that the infringer would have paid anyway under a licensing agreement. Reasonable people can differ over optimal patent scope and policy. Likewise, the PTO and the PTAB can issue and uphold more or fewer patents, and the courts can interpret the Patent Act in ways that we like or dislike. Reasonable people can also seek change through litigation, legislation and administrative channels. All of these mechanisms are organic parts of our tripartite system of government. We will never have a situation in which all partisan interests are equally happy with the rules or the outcome of every case – this is part and parcel of an adversarial legal system. But this is no reason to question the legitimacy of the system itself. So, far from a departure from the rule of law, what we see today in the patent system is the operation of a well-functioning legal regime seeking to address the interests of competing, but largely law-abiding, stakeholders.
Reinhold Cohn and the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA) will be offering a webinar entitled "Amendments to the Israeli Patent Law -- A Call to the Public from the Israel Ministry of Justice" on February 16, 2021 from 11:00 am to 12:30 pm (Eastern) and 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm (Israel Time). David Gilat of the Reinhold Cohn Group will moderate a program consisting of the following three sessions: (1) a general review of the Ministry of Justice call to the public; (2) workshops in virtual breakout rooms, allowing participants to concentrate on subjects of particular interest; and (3) an open discussion for questions.
Earlier this week I translated what, if affirmed (as I hope), will be a landmark antitrust ruling by the Munich I Regional Court against Google in the health information context. Last month I had already reported on another key decision from Munich: a preliminary reference to the European Court of Justice of a question concerning the availability of preliminary injunctions over battle-untested patents. Note that the reasons for the two occurrences of the word "preliminary" in the previous sentence are independent of each other: the term "preliminary reference" describes the presentation of questions of EU law to the bloc's top court by a national court regardless of whether such reference occurs in connection with preliminary injunctions or (which is almost always the case) in a full-blown proceeding just prior to final judgment. "Preliminary" means that the ECJ answers the question, and then the national court resumes its proceedings and enters its judgment, as opposed to a traditional appeal from a final judgment.
When I saw the question referred to the ECJ, I already noticed that it was very well written, and I wish the Dusseldorf Regional Court had done a similarly good job in that Nokia v. Daimler case (I agree with the Dusseldorf court's intent, but in terms of craftsmanship, the Munich court's work is--though I oppose its objective and had serious issues with that Munich panel last year over what I considered to be insufficient coronavirus prevention measures--hands-down superior by virtue of its clarity, structure, and focus).
The companies and organizations advocating proportionality in patent remedies should think hard about whether this referral to Luxembourg presents an opportunity to raise proportionality issues under the EU directive in question. There may not be another opportunity to challenge Germany's near-automatic patent injunction regime before the top EU court for years, given that I don't expect any regional or higher regional court to refer a proportionality-centric question to the ECJ. A court of final appeal would theoretically have to refer questions of EU law to the ECJ, but practically there are reasons why that could also take many years or never happen at all, the most important one of which is that German patent cases are typically settled early on.
2020 was an unusual year by all accounts. In this article we take a look back at developments in Canadian patent law in the past year, including the Government of Canada’s and the Canadian Patent Office’s response to COVID-19, the Canadian Patent Office’s new guidelines for patentable subject matter and some notable judgements from the Federal Court and the Federal Court of Appeal.
[...]
The Commissioner opted not to appeal Choueifaty. Instead, the Canadian Patent Office released new guidelines on patentable subject matter and provided a set of examples demonstrating the application of the new guidelines to computer-implemented inventions, medical diagnostic methods and medical uses on November 3, 2020.
Clearview AI, the facial recognition company that claims it's scraped 3 billion images from the internet to power its face-matching system, has proposed applying its technology to everything from policing to retail to dating, according to a 2020 patent application that became public on Thursday.
The patent filing was made in August — three months after the company said in a federal court that it would take voluntary actions to “avoid transacting with non-governmental customers anywhere.” The patent application, however, describes ways to apply its facial recognition software to the private sector as well as to law enforcement and social work, where it says it could be used to possibly identify people who use drugs or people experiencing homelessness.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has entered all areas of our life, including creative production and inventive activity. Modern AI is used, inter alia, for the production of newspaper articles; the generation of weather, company, and stock market reports; the composition of music; the creation of visual arts; and pharmaceutical and medicinal research and development. Despite the exponential growth of such real- world scenarios of artificial creativity and inventiveness, it is still unclear whether the output of creative and inventive AI processes – i.e., AI-generated ‘works’ and ‘inventions’ – should be protected under cop- yright or patent law. Current doctrine largely denies such protection on the grounds that no human crea- tor exists in cases where AI functions autonomously in the sense of being independent of and uncontrolled by humans. More recently, both the European Parliament and the EU Commission have put the topic on their agenda. Interestingly, their positions seem to contradict each other – one in favour of, one against creating new instruments of protection for AI-generated output. This and the rising debate in legal schol- arship (with equally contradictory positions) invites more analysis. A closer look at the doctrinal founda- tions and economic underpinnings of ‘work without author’ and ‘invention without inventor’ scenarios reveals that neither the law as it stands nor scholarly debate is currently up to the challenges posed by AI creativity and inventiveness.
The Intellectual Property Law Association of Chicago (IPLAC) International Relations Committee and Japan Patent Attorneys' Association (JPAA) will be presenting a program entitled "Patenting Artificial Intelligence (AI) inventions in Japan and the US" on February 17, 2021 from 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm (CST). Daryl Lim, Professor of Law, UIC/John Marshall Law School and Patrick G. Burns of Greer, Burns & Crain, Chicago will moderate a panel consisting of Takeshi Iizuka, Executive Director, JPAA; Naoki Okumura of Nakamura & Partners; Atsuko Miura of Tokai Patent Law Firm; and Ryan Phelan of Marshall Gerstein will provide a presentation about AI patents in Japan, a presentation about AI patents in the U.S., and a panel discussion with questions and comments.
Did you know that most of the articles published on Opensource.com are licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0?
One of the biggest reasons our editorial team decided on this license over 10 years ago is because we support the idea that the best content is shared content. As we strive to be open, our goal is for any many people as possible to have access to the information we're putting out there to support our mission to help others learn and grow and to explore new open source worlds.
So, what does this have to do with Valentine's Day (or Friend's Day in Finland)?
After being heavily criticized due to the prevalence of pirate streaming devices offered for sale on their platforms, Amazon and eBay now appear to be getting on top of the problem. While they haven't been completely eliminated, illegal devices are now much harder to find. The same cannot be said of pirate IPTV subscriptions, however.
Cox Communications has decided to appeal the $1 billion jury verdict in its piracy liability lawsuit against several major record labels. The Internet provider characterized the amount as "shockingly excessive" and successfully requested to delay the potential payment while appeals are pending.
Police in Taiwan say they have arrested nine people in connection with a pirate streaming operation that captured Japanese TV content and distributed it to pirate set-top devices. Meanwhile, police in Thailand raided five premises, seizing 100 receivers, decoders and satellite dishes believed to be supplying TV and movie content to an IPTV provider.
