This is a big win for Google and a warning for both Apple and Microsoft. It also signals to app and game developers that Chrome OS can no longer be ignored. Frankly, any business that provides a product or service over the internet should be setting aside resources to ensure the Chrome OS experience is comparable to Windows and macOS.
Data from both IDC and Strategy Analytics independently confirmed that trend. SA reported that Chromebooks outsold MacBooks during 2020 and especially during the fourth quarter. Research firm IDC (Disclosure: IDC and PCWorld are owned by the same parent company), which included desktops in its analysis, reported similar findings. A third analyst firm, Canalys, compiled data showing that total worldwide Chromebook shipments nearly quadrupled in 2020 to 11.2 million units, compared to just 2.9 million in 2019. SA's data is shown below.
However, the company said that a dramatic explosion in Chromebook sales during the year meant that ChromeOS convincingly kicked macOS into third place in the desktop OS battle…
How is open source utilized in the workplace? On this episode of FLOSS Weekly, veteran co-hosts Aaron Newcomb and Jonathan Bennett join Doc Searls in a lively discussion of open source news in workplaces—both professional and personal. Topics include: open source business and business models; involvements of Google, Microsoft and IBM in making open source history; a Microsoft repository showing up in the Raspberry Pi Linux; hacking current and retro gear; open hardware, including open FPGAs and RISC-V; and much more.
exotic meats, pixel 4a, automation
Mike crosses over to report back from the other side, and Chris is along for the ride.
Oracle today released their Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 5 Update 5 intended for use on their RHEL-based Oracle Linux. Oracle's "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" tends to be a newer Linux LTS kernel with extra features compared to what is found in the current RHEL / Red Hat Compatible Kernel builds.
Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 5 is a super-set of features for what is offered by the Red Hat Compatible Kernel "RHCK". With UEK Release 5 Update 5 there are several features back-ported.
Getting open-source multimedia drivers on Arm Linux is one of the most difficult tasks, that’s why there’s no much talk about open-source GPU drivers for 2D & 3D graphics acceleration, but work on video hardware decoding and encoding is also a challenge.
We’ve previously seen Bootlin work on Cedrus open-source driver for Allwinner VPU (Video Processing Unit), but Collabora has been working on open-source drivers for VeriSilicon’s Hantro G1 and G2 VPU found in some Rockchip, NXP, and Microchip processors.
The company previously managed to have Hantro G1 open-source driver for JPEG, MPEG-2, VP8, and H.264 codecs, but H.265/HEVC relies on Hantro G2, and the patch for H.265 hardware video decoding on NXP i.MX 8M Quad has just been submitted to mainline Linux.
Announcing a new -ck release, 5.11-ck1 with the latest version of the Multiple Queue Skiplist Scheduler, version 0.208 These are patches designed to improve system responsiveness and interactivity with specific emphasis on the desktop, but configurable for any workload.
Linux 5.11-ck1 or the new MuQSS 0.208 doesn't deliver much in the way of new functionality but is primarily about re-basing the existing code against the new kernel. Con's -ck patch-set plus the Multiple Queue Skiplist Scheduler (MuQSS) remain focused on improving Linux system responsiveness and interactivity, primarily for desktops but can also help mobile hardware and other devices.
Released yesterday was the Linux 5.10.17 LTS kernel and what makes this point release a bit more notable than usual is that it backports the CPUFreq patches from 5.11 that were used for addressing the earlier AMD performance regression on Linux 5.11 and often leading to net improvements as well over prior kernel series. The CPUFreq patches were back-ported while the AMD frequency invariance support was not, so what does the performance look like for the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel? Here are some benchmarks.
The newly-released Linux 5.10.17 kernel back-ported "cpufreq: ACPI: Extend frequency tables to cover boost frequencies" and "cpufreq: ACPI: Update arch scale-invariance max perf ratio if CPPC is not there". See this prior article for additional context but long story short these were the two patches to address the performance issue on Linux 5.11 when AMD frequency invariance was introduced for Zen 2 / Zen 3 and used when using the likes of the Schedutil governor.
David Miller sent in the big batch of networking improvements today for the ongoing Linux 5.12 merge window.
As usual with Linux being widely used on enterprise networking equipment and hardware vendors being especially concerned about driver support with high-end hardware commonly running Linux in the data center, the networking subsystem updates are quite extensive and varied. Among the many networking changes landing with Linux 5.12 include:
- RFC6056 "Recommendations for Transport-Protocol Port Randomization" is now implemented for better port randomization. "This document describes a number of simple and efficient methods for the selection of the client port number, such that the possibility of an attacker guessing the exact value is reduced. While this is not a replacement for cryptographic methods for protecting the transport-protocol instance, the aforementioned port selection algorithms provide improved security with very little effort and without any key management overhead."
The kernel's CFS bandwidth controller is an effective way of controlling just how much CPU time is available to each control group. It can keep processes from consuming too much CPU time and ensure that adequate time is available for all processes that need it. That said, it's not entirely surprising that the bandwidth controller is not perfect for every workload out there. This patch set from Huaixin Chang aims to make it work better for bursty, latency-sensitive workloads.
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Thus, for example, setting cpu.cfs_quota_us to 50000 and cpu.cfs_period_us to 100000 will enable the group to consume 50ms of CPU time in every 100ms period. Halving those values (setting cpu.cfs_quota_us to 25000 and cpu.cfs_period_us 50000) allows 25ms of CPU time every 50ms. In both cases, the group has been empowered to consume 50% of one CPU, but in the latter case that time will come more frequently, in smaller chunks.
The distinction between those two cases is important here. Imagine a control group containing a single process that needs to run for 30ms. In the first case, 30ms is less than the allowed 50ms, so the process will be able to complete its task without being throttled. In the second case, the process will be cut off after running for 25ms; it will then have to wait for the next 50ms period to start before it can finish its job. If the workload is sensitive to latency, the bandwidth-controller parameters need to be set with care.
This mechanism works reasonably well for workloads that consistently require a specific amount of CPU time. It can be a bit more awkward, though, for bursty workloads. A given process may use far less than its quota during most periods, but occasionally a burst of work may come along that requires more CPU time than the quota allows. In cases where latency doesn't matter, making that process wait for the next period to finish its work may not be a problem; if latency does matter, though, this delay can be a real concern.
As has often been pointed out, the stable-kernel releases are meant to be stable; that means they should be even more averse to ABI breaks than mainline releases, if that is possible. This may be a hard promise to keep for the next set of stable kernels, though, for the most mundane of reasons: nobody thought that there would be more than 255 minor updates to any given kernel release. For most of the existence of the kernel project, few developers within the project itself have maintained any given kernel release for more than a couple years or so, and maintenance releases were relatively rare. There were some exceptions; the 2.4 release happened at the beginning of 2001, and Willy Tarreau finally stopped maintaining it more than eleven years later. Even then, the final version was 2.4.37, though one could perhaps call it 2.4.48 after the final set of eleven small "fixup" releases. Releases for kernels maintained for the long term were relatively few and far apart.
In recent years, though, that situation has changed, with some older kernels receiving much more long-term-maintenance attention. Thus, February 3 saw the release of the 4.9.255 and 4.4.255 updates. Those kernels have received 18,765 and 16,986 patches, respectively, and there is no sign of things slowing down. The current posted plan is to maintain 4.9 through January 2023 and 4.4 through February 2022.
Of all the system calls in the Unix tradition, few are as maligned as ioctl(). But ioctl() exists for a reason — for many reasons, in truth — and cannot be expected to go away anytime soon. It is thus unsurprising that there is interest in providing ioctl()-like functionality in the io_uring subsystem. A recent RFC patch set from Jens Axboe shows the form that this feature might take in the io_uring context. The ioctl() name comes from "I/O control"; this system call was added as a way of performing operations on peripheral devices that went beyond reading and writing data. It could be used to rewind a tape drive, set the baud rate of a serial port, or eject a removable disk, for example. Over the years, uses of ioctl() have grown far beyond such simple applications, with some APIs (media, for example) providing hundreds of operations.
The criticism of ioctl() comes from its multiplexed and device-dependent nature; almost anything that can be represented by a file descriptor supports ioctl(), but the actual operations supported vary from one to the next. While system calls are (in theory, at least) closely scrutinized before being added to the kernel, ioctl() commands often receive close to no review at all. So nobody really knows everything that can be done with ioctl(). For added fun, there is some overlap in the command space, meaning that an ioctl() call made to the wrong file descriptor could have unexpected and highly unpleasant results. Attempts have been made to avoid this problem, but they have not been completely successful.
David Sterba on Tuesday submitted the Btrfs file-system updates for the Linux 5.12 kernel, which once again include more performance optimizations and notable new features.
Some of the performance enhancements for Btrfs with this next Linux kernel version includes improved flushing that can lead to better throughput for random write loads, preemptive background flushing, less locking contention, avoiding some possible long stalls on deletes, and improvements targeting Dbench that can lead to ~7% higher throughput and 20% lower latency.
Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in the big set of USB/Thunderbolt updates already for the ongoing Linux 5.12 merge window.
Last year I wrote about how to create a user-specific XKB layout, followed by a post explaining that this won't work in X. But there's a pandemic going on, which is presumably the only reason people haven't all switched to Wayland yet. So it was time to figure out a workaround for those still running X.
This Merge Request (scheduled for xkeyboard-config 2.33) adds a "custom" layout to the evdev.xml and base.xml files. These XML files are parsed by the various GUI tools to display the selection of available layouts. An entry in there will thus show up in the GUI tool.
Our rulesets, i.e. the files that convert a layout/variant configuration into the components to actually load already have wildcard matching [1]. So the custom layout will resolve to the symbols/custom file in your XKB data dir - usually /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/custom.
This file is not provided by xkeyboard-config. It can be created by the user though and whatever configuration is in there will be the "custom" keyboard layout. Because xkeyboard-config does not supply this file, it will not get overwritten on update.
Back in January we reported on how NVIDIA was looking to support hardware accelerated GL and Vulkan rendering with Xwayland, and it seems it's continuing to progress.
To save you a quick click: in the Merge Request to the xserver, NVIDIA engineer Erik Kurzinger mentioned their patches were intended to support a new upcoming Linux driver release and with the patches and the new driver together it "should just start working". Performance should be fine in full-screen games, as long as the compositor supports the required zwp_linux_dmabuf_v1 interface.
All important work, as XWayland will be used when Wayland replaces the legacy X11 display server most distributions and most gamers use to ensure your games continue working.
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. Playing media is one of my favorite reasons to use Linux.
You may prefer vinyl and cassette tapes or VHS and Laserdisc, but it's still most likely that you consume the majority of the media you enjoy on a digital device. There's a convenience to media on a computer that can't be matched, largely because most of us are near a computer for most of the day. Many modern computer users don't give much thought to what applications are available for listening to music and watching movies because most operating systems provide a media player by default or because they subscribe to a streaming service and don't keep media files around themselves. But if your tastes go beyond the usual hit list of popular music and shows, or if you work with media for fun or profit, then you have local files you want to play. You probably also have opinions about the available user interfaces. On Linux, choice is a mandate, and so your options for media playback are endless.
Usually each component manufacturer has their own software for controlling RGB lights, with some requiring an online account to function. For Linux users, even that is not usually available since most of these applications are proprietary and Windows only. This is where OpenRGB comes in.
Ever find yourself needing to implement a device tree blob (aka FDT, flattened device tree) parser and want to save yourself some time? Learn from my mistakes!
WebPKG is a web-interface for the OpenBSD ports collection. It features a full-text search across package names, comment, description and mantainer field, as well as a presentation page for the packages.
A server is application software that listens to requests over a network and returns the requested files, data, etc. Linux machines have servers installed for many different protocols: Eg. HTTP Server, SSH Server, FTP Server, etc.
The computers which request data from a server (client machines) using either a web browser for HTTP requests or an SSH or FTP Client and are obviously identified by an IP address.
In this article, we will learn how to find out what IP addresses are connected to your Linux server.
Network and Server administration is one of the key areas in which Linux is actually preferred to any other operating system. Hence most data center admins are well versed with the Linux command line.
There can be scenarios when certain ports on a server, which were required to be closed, are open and causing unexpected traffic on the server.
Today, we will learn how to find and close an open port in Linux.
cURL is used to send data or fetch data to/from a server. This data is transferred using the following protocols: FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, POP3, SCP, SFTP, SMTP, TELNET, TFTP, and many more. cURL does not involve any user interaction. You can also use this tool when testing RESTful API’s and much more.
cert-manager builds on top of Kubernetes, introducing certificate authorities and certificates as first-class resource types in the Kubernetes API. This feature makes it possible to provide Certificates as a Service to developers working within your Kubernetes cluster.
cert-manager is an open source project based on Apache License 2.0 provided by Jetstack. Since cert-manager is an open source application, it has its own GitHub page.
This guide will show you how you can install cert-manager in Red Hat OpenShift with an Operator. After that, you will issue a self-signed certificate through the installed cert-manager. You can also follow this tutorial by watching this video.
The challenges of the past year have enabled us to do things differently, including the way one learns through online training and testing your skills through certification exams. These self-growth initiatives continue to help you further advance your knowledge and careers as sysadmins. These opportunities also positively impact your organizations. There are numerous ways to take Red Hat exams available in some areas.
Last year, Red Hat launched remote certification exams in response to the evolving pandemic situation. I have sat several Red Hat exams in an onsite testing center in the past. Over the holidays. I also completed remote exams in the safety of my work-from-home desk and at a remote office room location. I can say that the remote exam experience is very similar to traditional onsite exams, with a few more steps to set up your environment and ensure you have connectivity speeds that meet the minimum requirements.
Have you recently tried running oc new-app on Red Hat OpenShift and received a similar error message to the one below?
W0216 12:21:52.014221 671649 dockerimagelookup.go:237] container image registry lookup failed: docker.io/username/image:latest: toomanyrequests: You have reached your pull rate limit. You may increase the limit by authenticating and upgrading: https://www.docker.com/increase-rate-limit If so, you do not need to upgrade your Docker account to a paid one. Instead, you can use a secret to pull your images as an authenticated Docker Hub user.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install GitScrum on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, GitScrum is a free, open-source project management tool that you may use to cope with projects with ease. GitScrum makes use of the noted Git platform and Scrum application methodology to allow for greater team management. With GitScrum, organizations can triage and distribute work throughout groups in numerous departments based on email, calls, orders, projects, tasks, reminders, calendar events, and more.
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 the GitScrum management tool 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.
In my "Linux Essentials" series, I go over the basic details of one Linux command or service in each episode in order to teach you the basics. In this episode, I go over the "pacman" command, which is the package manager for Arch Linux and other distributions that are based on Arch Linux.
Over the last few days, I've been exploring options for making my website faster and cheaper. While I ultimately moved to the $10 Linode option, I nearly switched to Squarespace. During that trial period, I developed a guide for moving from Ghost to Squarespace.
Linux Mint is one the best Linux distributions for beginners. Especially Windows users that want to switch to Linux, will find its flagship Cinnamon desktop environment very familiar.
Cinnamon gives a traditional desktop experience and many users like it as it is. It doesn’t mean you have to content with what it provides. Cinnamon provides several ways for customizing the desktop.
Reading about MATE and KDE customization guides, many readers requested similar tutorial for Linux Mint Cinnamon as well. Hence, I created this basic guide on tweaking the looks and feel of Cinnamon desktop.
Have you ever wanted to quickly and easily encrypt files in Linux without having to install and learn new software packages? Here's an excellent and easy way to easily encrypt files or directories via AES256 secured with a password, helping keep your files away from prying eyes.
The rm command is used in Linux to delete files and directories. It can be used to delete a few files by specifying each file name, or it can be used with the -r argument (recursive) to delete a directory and the entire directory tree structure which lies beneath it.
Gradle is a well-known software build-tool that is mostly used for development in Java, C++, and Swift. By combining all of the best features of Ant and Maven, it brings the best development practices to its users. Instead of using XML language for scripting, Gradle uses Groovy which is an OO language for defining the project.
Hive is a Data Warehouse model in Hadoop Eco-System. It can perform as an ETL tool on top of Hadoop. Enabling High Availability (HA) on Hive is not similar as we do in Master Services like Namenode and Resource Manager.
Automatic failover will not happen in Hive (Hiveserver2). If any Hiveserver2 (HS2) fails, running jobs on that failed HS2 will get fail. We need to resubmit the job so that the job can run on other HiveServer2. So, enabling HA on HS2 is nothing but, increasing the number of HS2 components in Cluster.
Using RedHat CodeReady Containers (CRC), we can easily install latest version of OpenShift cluster on laptop, desktop or in a virtual machine. In this tutorial, we will demonstrate how to setup single node openshift cluster on RHEL 8 system with crc. This type of openshift cluster is used only for testing and development purpose, it is not recommended for the production use.
What is Docker Stack ? Docker Stack can be used to deploy a complete application stack to a docker swarm. This is great for deploying multi tiered applications.
Getting detailed information related to files on your storage is tricky if you do not know how to use the ls command. Here we'll discuss everything associated with the ls command on Linux, along with some various flags used with it.
Sometimes you just need to know what files are included in a particular package. The DNF command, like yum and rpm before it, provides a simple way to list files in a package. In this Linux quick tip we will show you how to list all files included in a package.
Listing files in a package is quite simple with the DNF package manager. Simply use repoquery with the -l option followed by the name of the package. For example, let’s see what games are provided in the bsd-games package.
CrossCode, the retro-inspired 2D Action RPG set in the distant future is set to get an expansion with CrossCode: A New Home confirmed to be releasing on February 26.
"A New Home continues right after the Events of CrossCode and offers more of what you learned to love already: A story rich experience filled up with tons of enemies, bosses and puzzles. Follow Lea on her journey figuring out the truth, use your elements like never before and don't forget to finish the raid. This time for real."
Blasphemous has another free expansion out now with Blasphemous: Strife & Ruin, pulling in Miriam from Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night along with more free content.
Tasked with helping Miriam return to her world, you go through a series of platforming challenges and collect shards to repair a portal for Miriam to go home. Filled full of traps it's a challenge mode to improve your precision platform abilities and you get a special reward if you manage to finish it.
Another major addition is the Boss Rush Mode, which you need to complete the main story to access. This mode features courses containing a selection of bosses that you take on using any save file and each has a score attached to it with medals awarded.
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You can buy Blasphemous from Humble Store and Steam for a key, sadly the Linux build is still not available on GOG.
Wasteland 3 is playable on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux computers, as well as the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles. Below you can see both the minimum and the recommended system requirements for running the game on PC, no matter which operating system you are using.
Calamares is a modular installer for Linux distributions using Qt and KDE technologies. It is used by dozens of Linux distro’s for that crucial step of “get the ISO onto the HDD”, or some modern variant thereof. It’s modular, so distro’s can pick-and-choose what is needed: OpenRC or systemd, for instance. But it’s hard to cover everything that Linux distributions might need, so Calamares also has an “extensions” repository for more specialised modules. Let’s take a look.
The screenshot here shows the first screen of Calamares (in demonstration mode, so “real” distro’s will probably have distro-specific styling). There’s a number of user-visible “pages” to Calamares: welcome, location, etc. There are modules that are responsible for each of those; the main Calamares distribution contains a configurable welcome module, and an alternative QML-based welcomeq module as well – plenty of choice for distro’s.
There are more modules than what is visible here, though: all the invisible steps like making a user, settting up the display manager, configuring OpenRC (or systemd) .. those are modules as well. For these invisible steps there are certainly some that make sense only for specialised distro’s, so while Calamares aims to be modular and address “most” of what a Linux needs to get installed, there is always one more module for that special case (like pre-installing CDE theming, or whatever).
Coming three weeks after GNOME 3.38.3, this fourth point release is here to introduce more bug fixes, translation updates, and small improvements to keep the GNOME 3.38 desktop environment series as stable and reliable as possible.
Among the noteworthy changes implemented in GNOME 3.38.4, there’s better HiDPI support on Wayland for the Evince document viewer, Flatpak improvements in the GNOME Boxes virtual machine manager, as well as improved login screen accessibility in GNOME Shell.
Tiny Core Linux aka ‘The Core Project’ is a modular Linux-based distribution that offers basic functionality in a very small package with the user having the freedom to choose whatever application and hardware support they want.
Recently, the team behind Tiny Core Linux announced the release of version 12.0. It was being worked on since the last year and is being offered with a host of improvements.
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CorePlus (106 MB): This is an installable ISO that includes the base Core system, seven different window managers that include Openbox, Fluxbox, JWM (Joe’s Window Manager), FLWM, ICE WM, and Hackedbox, wireless support, non-US keyboard layout support and a remastering tool. They recommend this for new users as this will help them explore what Tiny Core Linux has to offer.
Did Linux kill Commercial Unix, three node GlusterFS setup on FreeBSD, OpenBSD on the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano (1st Gen), NetBSD on EdgeRouter Lite, TLS Mastery first draft done
I have a few development jails dedicated to my work on FreshPorts. It’s been a hobby of mine since the late 1990s. The code I create gets packaged, ready to deploy onto the test, stage, and production hosts.
What I absolutely do not want to happen, and it’s happened recently, is for those packages to be installed on the development environments. Why? It installs to the same location as the working copy of my code.
This article is about giving a short description of EVERY service available as part of an OpenBSD default installation (= no package installed).
From all this list, only the following list is started by default: openssh, ntpd syslogd and smtpd (listening on localhost only).
Devuan, the Linux distribution that came into being after the 2014 disagreement over Debian’s adoption of the systemd as the operating system’s init daemon, has celebrated its sixth anniversary by adding a third init option.
On February 14th, the self-described Veteran Unix Admins behind the project reminded users that their first pre-Alpha landed on the same day in 2015.
The project delivered the new Devuan Beowulf 3.1.0 at the weekend.
The new SBC announcement came as part of the February update announcement from Pine64. The board pictured is the Quartz64 model A, a larger form factor board with a unique layout. A model B with a more familiar Raspberry Pi 4 size and pin layout will be coming later, though no further details are available at this stage.
In terms of functionality, the Quartz64 seems to share a lot with Pine64's previous RockPro64 SBC, though there are also some significant upgrades. Up to 8GB of RAM will be supported, along with an optional 16-128GB eMMC storage.
Over the years, we’ve seen many LoRa modules combining STM32 microcontroller with Semtech SX12xx wireless transceivers, so that’s probably why STMicro decided to create the first LoRa SoC with STM32WL that was launched last year.
Dustin Watts developed FreeTouchDeck software to interface with Windows, macOS, Linux computers and boards over Bluetooth LE using an ESP32 board connected to a touchscreen display.
Now don’t get us wrong, WordPress is one of our favorite applications. With good reason, it’s a high quality, open source blog publishing application. It’s a mature and highly polished application with development starting in 2003, and it has an active community. The largest self-host blogging tool, a full content management system, which can be extended through thousands of widgets, plugins, and themes, is a good fit for many projects. The software was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL.
WordPress instantly springs to mind when any project is planned that needs a content management system. However, WordPress can be complicated, offering more bells and whistles than actually needed or wanted. While it’s always tempting to stick with familiar territory, this can actually stifle creativity and does not enhance an individual’s skill-set.
When embarking on a new project, there’s a lot to be said experimenting with new software. Fortunately, WordPress is not the only option. There’s a good range of lightweight open source content management systems ready to be deployed that can transform a web site.
Some of the content management systems featured in this article are well publicised, but there are many good management systems that you may not have heard of that are perfectly suited for small projects.
Here is our verdict with our recommendations. They are all free and open source goodness.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced Guardian Project director Nathan Freitas as its second keynote speaker for LibrePlanet 2021. The annual technology and social justice conference will be held online on March 20 and 21, 2021, with the theme "Empowering Users."
Kinda always thought it was weird that Unix didn’t have an app that could search for files where multiple patterns matched.
The patterns shouldn’t have to be on the same lines, but each term needs to be in the file.
This is a very basic Gemini client library for Common Lisp. The interface is basically similar to that of the Drakma HTTP library. This isn't a complete client; it includes basically only the networking routines you would build an actual client around, and is intended for use in actual clients and scripts such as feed aggregators.
package got to CRAN earlier today, a few months since the last relase. The dang package regroups a few functions of mine that had no other home as for example lsos() from a StackOverflow question from 2009 (!!) is one, this overbought/oversold price band plotter from an older blog post is another.
Agile's growing popularity over the last 20 or so years causes some organizations to get it wrong—they apply a bandage when full-blown sustainable solutions are required. But many companies are getting it right with patience, commitment, collaboration, and amazingly intelligent and creative agile leaders and experts to guide them. Many of these experts are sharing their knowledge through podcasts, allowing anyone to learn from their experience.
I have always enjoyed listening to podcasts and even considered creating one. I used to listen to them while driving to and from work, but surprisingly, I listen to them more now, even though I'm working from home.
As with books, there are a lot of scrum and agile podcast options you can choose when you want to learn more. The following are my top three favorite agile podcasts; they provide me a lot of value, and they're well worth my time. I hope this list helps you decide which agile podcasts to start listening to.
Diversity of thought leads to success
There is always a certain amount of tension between the goals of those using older, less-popular architectures and the goals of projects targeting more mainstream users and systems. In many ways, our community has been spoiled by the number of architectures supported by GCC, but a lot of new software is not being written in C—and existing software is migrating away from it. The Rust language is often the choice these days for both new and existing code bases, but it is built with LLVM, which supports fewer architectures than GCC supports—and Linux runs on. So the question that arises is how much these older, non-Rusty architectures should be able to hold back future development; the answer, in several places now, has been "not much".
The latest issue came up on the Gentoo development mailing list; Michaà â Górny noted that the Python cryptography library has started replacing some of its C code with Rust, which is now required to build the library. Since the Gentoo Portage package manager indirectly depends on cryptography, "we will probably have to entirely drop support for architectures that are not supported by Rust". He listed five architectures that are not supported by upstream Rust (alpha, hppa, ia64, m68k, and s390) and an additional five that are supported but do not have Gentoo Rust packages (mips, 32-bit ppc, sparc, s390x, and riscv).
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Eventually, things boiled over and commenting was disallowed from anyone other than project contributors. Gaynor, in particular, felt that the problems were unavoidable for these, largely ancient, platforms. Once the thread had closed, he summarized what had been discussed and reiterated that the cryptography developers are not going to be held back by platforms that do not support Rust.
Back in Gentoo-land, it turned out that the cryptography dependency for Portage came because it was using urllib3 and requests. Those two packages in Gentoo are dependent on cryptography, but it turns out that they do not actually need it. A pull request to fix that was merged, so the problem for Portage, which is pretty fundamental to the operation of a Gentoo system, was averted.
Gemini is built on a foundation that one network request for a resource simply returns the entire resource or an error. There are no multi-request documents, where various pieces are collected up from (potentially) multiple servers a la HTML. Each Gemini document (a .gmi or .gemini file) is a collection of text in a Markdown-derived markup language, along with links to other resources, but each appears as the only item on its own line. Other resources can be returned, identified by their Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) media type, which clients can display or defer to another type of application depending on the type.
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In order to take a peek into Geminispace, I grabbed the AV-98 client that was created by the founder of Gemini, "Solderpunk". AV-98 is a 1500-line, terminal-based, Python program with no required dependencies beyond the Python standard library. When run, it gives a command prompt; the AV-98 "lightning introduction" suggested "go gemini.circumlunar.space", so that's what I did. I was greeted with the project's home page in Geminispace, which is the counterpart to the web-based home page linked above.
It gives a terse bulleted list for a project overview, along with several other categories (Resources, Web proxies, Search engines, Geminispace aggregators, etc.), each of which had entries preceded by a number. Those numbers can be typed to follow that link, thus retrieve the document described. For example, following the "Users with Gemini content on this server" to the entry for "solderpunk", gives the following document...
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Gemini uses uniform resource identifiers (URIs) with the "gemini" scheme. URIs are closely related to the URLs used by the web, a superset in fact; the URI of the Gemini home page is, thus: "gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/". The URI for the page shown above is: "gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/solderpunk/".
A Gemini request is made by connecting to the server (on port 1965 by default), successfully negotiating a TLS connection, then sending a URI, followed by a carriage return and linefeed (CRLF). The response is a two-digit status code, a space character, a "meta" field of up to 1024 bytes, and a CRLF. The contents of the meta field are status-code-dependent. For success codes (those starting with a "2", so 2x), the meta field is a MIME media type that describes the type of the response, which directly follows the CRLF as the response body. The MIME "charset" parameter can be used to specify an encoding other than the UTF-8 default for the response body, but that is mainly meant for legacy documents; everything else in requests and responses is always in UTF-8.
The server closes the connection after it sends a response; the client can determine whether the response body is complete based on whether the TLS connection has been cleanly shut down or not. There are a few other status codes beyond the 2x success codes, including 4x and 5x error codes (temporary and permanent, respectively), 3x redirect, and 1x input required; the latter is how interactive Gemini applications prompt for user input (e.g. search terms). Beyond that, the 6x codes request a client TLS certificate (or indicate that the one provided was rejected). Using client certificates is a way to restrict access to a resource or to voluntarily establish a server-side session without requiring passwords, cookies, or the like.
I'd like to broaden that definition a bit, because it's not just about upsetting news, it's about any news. Doomscrolling for me is when I scroll through feeds, then decide it's enough, put the phone down, can't think of anything else to do, so pick the phone back up and continue. Often I'm so sucked in that when I finally look away from my phone, my eyes take a while to adjust and feel strained. A few months ago I decided that this is a bad habit, and needed to stop.
In another lifetime this would have sounded perfectly ridiculous to me, but fishing on a fictional island saved my sanity. Not knowing what was to come, the Saturday before New York went into lockdown I self-soothed in ways aid workers may recognise. I pulled out my two first aid field kits and customised them for the pandemic. I packed a go bag. I think I ended up packing two. Among tidy rows of cough syrup and antibacterial wipes, I found a semblance of serenity. Humanitarians often have to take stock of unfamiliar situations and respond or react accordingly. I couldn’t tell if I was losing my touch or if we really were in for the catastrophic disaster I so desperately feared. I wasn’t exactly certain about the future – but I was determined to have a plan of action. On my last subway ride for months, I also ordered a Nintendo Switch, along with a gravity blanket (a weighted blanket designed to ease anxiety and promote sleep), and a humidifier. After years spent travelling for most of the year, I was facing life for an unknown period in two small-ish rooms on my lonesome.
The team’s work represents a new record, for their mammoth DNA is, by some half a million years, the oldest ever successfully reconstituted. Extracted from horses, bears and even Neanderthals and Denisovans, two close cousins of modern humans, such ancient DNA has proven an invaluable tool for investigating the past. Although fossils preserve the gross physical features of extinct animals, they are silent about many crucial details that even an incomplete genome can help to fill in.
The trouble with DNA is that it breaks down post mortem. The more broken-down it is, the harder it is to sequence. Scientists think that, after about 6m years, all that would be left would be individual base pairs, the equivalent of trying to reconstruct a book from a heap of its constituent letters. Under the right conditions, however, such as the extreme cold of Arctic permafrost, this decay can be slowed.
Vaccine hesitancy persists even in some surprising places, including medical staff at some Israeli hospitals. As of Feb. 10, the staff vaccination rate ranged from 43 to 80 percent across major Israeli hospitals.
In a Feb. 9 letter, Sens. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, and Marco Rubio, R-Florida ââ¬â¢ the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, respectively — expressed their concern with the federal response to date.
In New Jersey, the system had yet to work correctly after five weeks, two administration officials who asked not to be identified said last week. That was a high-profile stumble for Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, which is trying to build a big business by selling software to run hospitals and health care systems and has been touting its ability to aid the nationwide effort to inoculate residents against the coronavirus.
The maker of the software, Cybergenetics, has insisted in lower court proceedings that the program’s source code is a trade secret.
Netflix has developed a Domain Graph Service (DGS) framework and it is now open source. The DGS framework simplifies the implementation of GraphQL, both for standalone and federated GraphQL services. Our framework is battle-hardened by our use at scale.
DGS is used within Netflix and the various features are thoroughly tested. Under the hood, DGS uses the graphql-java library. Netflix recommends a schema-first development approach to define the contract. Tooling can be used to consume the schema. Backward compatibility is important, especially with a federated GraphQL setup, and can be verified by comparing the different schema versions.
As an alternative to REST, GraphQL solves the issue of over-fetching or under-fetching data. Over-fetching is fetching all the data from an endpoint, but using only a portion of that data for, say, a mobile application. This requires filtering and leaving the remaining data unused. Under-fetching is fetching all the data from an endpoint, but not having enough data. This usually requires a call to a second endpoint. For example, consider an endpoint, /student. One user might want to retrieve all the student’s email addresses while another user might want to retrieve the various classes in which the students are enrolled.
The Linux Foundation said it entered a collaboration agreement with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) to create open source software. Darpa and the LF will create a broad collaboration umbrella that allows US government projects, their ecosystem and the open-source community to participate in accelerating innovation and security in the areas of 5G, edge, AI, standards, programmability and IoT, among other technologies.
The Linux Foundation has signed an agreement with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to establish an open source project for the U.S. government.
The agreement calls for the Linux Foundation and DARPA to work together in the areas of 5G, edge, artificial intelligence, standards, programmability and IoT, among other technologies.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is partnering with a major technology consortium to establish an open-source software development collaboration ecosystem to advance emerging technologies such as 5G, according to a Wednesday press release.
The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization that hosts open-source efforts including Kubernetes and the O-RAN Alliance’s software community, signed a cooperative research and development agreement, or CRADA, with DARPA to create a “broad collaboration umbrella” called US Government Open Programmable and Secure, or US GOV OPS. DARPA’s Open Programmable Secure 5G, or OPS-5G, effort will be the first project included under the umbrella, according to the release.
The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced it has signed a collaboration agreement with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to create open source software that accelerates United States government technology research and development innovation.
Under the agreement, DARPA and the LF will create a broad collaboration umbrella (US Government Open Programmable Secure (US GOV OPS) that allows United States Government projects, their ecosystem, and open community to participate in accelerating innovation and security in the areas of 5G, Edge, AI, Standards, Programmability, and IOT among other technologies. The project formation encourages ecosystem players to support US Government initiatives to create the latest in technology software.
Microsoft may not be able to innovate on products, and they usually fail miserably. But it is shockingly good at marketing, propaganda, and take-overs.
Microsoft has essentially deprecated JavaScript and the non-profit foundation, which governed it, by TypeScript, which is governed and controlled by the for-profit Microsoft Corporation. If Microsoft was truly interested in improving JavaScript it could have done that through the non-profit foundation. But instead, it took the ‘Evil Corp’ approach of making the foundation and JavaScript slowly irrelevant, so it could guarantee that it could monopolize and monetize the whole industry.
Managing Linux servers can feel like a chore specially if you have to perform repeated tasks.
Updating the server is one of those tasks. While you can opt to automatically install security updates on your server, it doesn't make you completely free from the maintenance task.
Why? Because the security updates to the kernel require restarting Ubuntu server.
If you use Ubuntu server on one of the cloud services like Linode, you'll notice that it notifies you that your system requires restart.
Think nobody cares about your Raspberry Pi? Here’s why you must patch Raspberry Pi Linux Kernel with KernelCare live patching service.
The Raspberry Pi kicked off a computing revolution. In 2012 at Cambridge University, a small team envisioned a tiny, cheap computer that can help revive interest in computer sciences. The first version, Model B, launched for about $50 and had everything it needed to run a full computer operating system - support for Linux, on-board memory, and physical IO ports.
A fully functional computer that is that cheap was going to be revolutionary, and the Raspberry Pi has found a home with enthusiasts - but also with commercial users. In fact, the Raspberry Pi Foundation estimates that 44% of Raspberry Pi units are sold to industrial customers.
"Five million Texans are without power tonight and temperatures are below freezing. People will most certainly die tonight because of it. But Gov. Abbott had time to go on Sean Hannity to blame the Green New Deal."
Not only humans but four-legged migrants are at risk from€ border walls. Other species can be climate refugees too.
"The case against student loan forgiveness is looking shakier by the day... We can and should do it," said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
On January 27, 2021, a “rag-tag internet crew” was winning the day at Wall Street- “at least for now”, with “gains since the start of January to 1,745%”. The crew exploited a well-known, perfectly legal gambling technique called “short selling”, using as chips the stocks of a gaming retail company called Gamestop.
The crew gambled well enough, big enough, to make huge financial companies lose billions of dollars. Of course, this was not the first time that something similar happened. It just was the first stock gambling stunt “orchestrated by a bunch of loosely affiliated social media users acting on a meme”. The gamblers traded stocks for free thanks to a free app called Robinhood, coordinating their actions on public forums, on Reddit and Discord.
Big stories reveal the good, the bad and the ugly of humankind—and that includes those who report and comment on the news.
Summary: Google's Street View is a powerful mapping tool that allows users to visit places they'll possibly never be able to visit and allows local users to see homes and businesses they're trying to locate.
Counsel from three companies, including Sanofi, delve into when they pursue attorney fees in patent litigation and how private practice lawyers can help
In a terse, non-precedential opinion, the Federal Circuit affirmed a district court's judgment that Defendants Torrent Pharmaceuticals and Indoco Remedies Ltd. had failed to prove that the claims asserted by Plaintiff/patentee Takeda were obvious, either under the statute or the judicially created doctrine of obviousness-type double patenting, in Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. v. Torrent Pharmaceuticals Ltd.
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Turning to obviousness under 35 U.S.C. ۤ 103, Defendants asserted art purportedly teaching substitution of a xanthine scaffold moiety for the uracil moiety in alogliptin. The Federal Circuit agreed that the District Court did not err in concluding that Defendants had not shown that the skilled worker could reasonably expected this substitution to be successful. This was because "the interchangeability references on which Indoco relies do not pertain to DPP-IV inhibitors or diabetes [thereby failing any expectation that the substituted compound would be operative], nor do they, or any other prior art of record, teach substituting an existing xanthine scaffold for uracil (thereby failing to establish the viability of the substitution on structural grounds]."
The opinion concludes by considering Defendants' argument that the District Court erred as to the level of skill of the ordinarily skilled worker. This question arose with regard to whether the skilled person should have "specific experience developing DPP-IV inhibitors and/or type II diabetes drugs," and was relevant to the weight the District Court gave to the testimony of Takeda's expert who lacked such experience. The Federal Circuit found this distinction immaterial because the District Court considered the prior art from both perspectives (i.e., a skilled artisan with and without such expertise) and found Defendants had not shown Takeda's asserted claims to be obvious ("[g]iven the substantive gaps in establishing motivation and reasonable expectation of success identified above, the record supports the district court's conclusion that it would have reached the same outcome under either definition of a skilled artisan"). Moreover, the opinion states that Defendants failed to show that applying the standard to the skilled artisan issue they espouse would have made any difference. Accordingly, the Federal Circuit affirmed the District Court's finding against Defendants.
In a bench trial, the district court invalidated Amarin’s patent covering a drug treatment for hypertriglyceridemia — finding the claims obvious over a combination of prior art references that had been previously considered by the USPTO. On appeal, the Federal Circuit affirmed without opinion (R.36). Now, the patentee has filed a petition with the US Supreme Court asking for clarification of the Graham analysis. In particular, what is the role of the objective indicia of non-obviousness. We sometimes call these “secondary factors” — and that is the focus of the particular dispute. Does the Federal Circuit err when it (sometimes) relegates the objective indicia to a secondary status.
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Id. Goodyear was a 5-4 decision written by Justice Owen Roberts. Justice Hugo Black dissented with a quote from a 19th Century Court decision: “a shadow of a shade of an idea.” A. Works v. Brady, 107 U.S. 192 (1883) (“It was never the object of [the patent] laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures.”).
Leading Economic Expert finds that PTAB challenges lower total costs and benefit the US Economy almost $2 billion regardless of whether litigation stays are granted
The Perryman Group, in a recent economic study commissioned by Unified, found substantial cost savings in district court cases when there is a copending IPR proceeding regardless of whether a stay is granted or not.
The study found either outcome resulted in substantial benefits to the U.S. economy by improving business activity $1.87 billion and saving 8,530 job years. That included where an IPR was conducted parallel to an ongoing district court proceeding, where the Perryman Group estimated the economic benefits of cost savings over the 2014-19 period of $135.4 million in US gross product and 617 person-years of employment. The study also found these benefits are primarily concentrated in the manufacturing sector.
On February 15, 2021, the PTAB granted Unified's request for ex parte reexamination, finding substantial questions of patentability for all claims of U.S. Patent 7,515,635, owned by IP Bridge. The patent is claimed to be essential as part of HEVC Advance’s patent pool (HEVC Advance patent list), as well as SISVEL’s VP9 and AV1 patent pools.
Dallas Invents is a weekly look at U.S. patents granted with a connection to the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metro area. Listings include patents granted to local assignees and/or those with a North Texas inventor. Patent activity can be an indicator of future economic growth, as well as the development of emerging markets and talent attraction. By tracking both inventors and assignees in the region, we aim to provide a broader view of the region’s inventive activity. Listings are organized by Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC).
Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault insists that his own legislation on this issue is forthcoming. But rather than interfere in the market and risk access to news content on platforms, Canada would do far better by implementing the previously announced industry support mechanisms and encourage all news organizations to spend their time competing in the market, rather than focusing their energies on lobbying that leads to poorly thought out bills such as the one introduced by Senator Carignan.
The popular 'Watched' streaming app is used by large numbers of viewers to watch movies, TV shows and live sports for free. However, global anti-piracy group ACE is taking action to undermine the user experience, including by attempting to track down the operators of sites that form crucial parts of the extended 'Watched' infrastructure.
Reddit's latest transparency report reveals that the number of copyright takedown notices it receives continues to rise. Last year, 375,774 pieces of content were removed following copyright holder complaints. This is a 300% increase compared to the year before. At the same time, Reddit's repeat infringer policy resulted in 303 users and 514 subreddits being banned.
