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Saturday, June 25, 2016

Solus 1.2 “Shannon” Released With New Features — One Of The Fastest Booting Linux Distros

Solus OS is often pegged as one of the fastest booting Linux distributions. It’s an operating system that’s designed for modern desktop PC experience.

The latest release of the operating system i.e. Solus 1.2 “Shannon”, has now arrived and it’s immediately available for download.

Solus 1.2 is built upon the groundwork laid by previous releases with improvements being made to Budgie and other software optimizations. Solus 1.2 also focuses on bringing a better gaming experience.

This release is the part of Solus 1.x series of the operating system that offers something different from other Linux distributions. Apart from its speed and lightweight nature, its desktop environment Budgie makes Solus different.

It’s created from the scratch by Solus Project with simplicity and elegance in mind. Budgie Desktop in Solus 1.2 is polished and refined with new features. By tightly integrating the GNOME stack, Solus provides a pleasant desktop experience.

New changes and features in Solus 1.2

Solus 1.2 brings the out-of-the-box support for 32-bit applications. This also means that one can now install apps like Steam, Skype, Teamviewer, and Wine on Solus operating system.

To make gaming a smoother experience, Solus Project has brought a new tool called Linux Steam Integration. It’s an open source project that everybody can access on its GitHub page.

The Software Center in Solus 1.2 has been revamped, making it easier for the users to explore and install new programs. Now one will be able to install a particular set of third party software, like Chrome, right from the software center.

By making improvements to Solus OS installer, the process of getting your system ready has been made hassle free. Now, the process of choosing a language and keyboard has been made more fluid. The installer offers certain strategies–Dual-boot, Full-disk, Manual, Replace OS–for configuring a system.

Other general improvements to the OS cover as much as 150 bug fixes pertaining to Budgie, software availability, and other areas.

The major open source software that ship out-of-the-box with Solus 1.2 include:

Firefox 47
Nautilus 3.18.5
Rhythmbox 3.3.1
Thunderbird 45.1.0
VLC 2.2.4

If you are running Solus 1.1, upgrading to the latest Shannon release is just a few clicks away using the default package manager. If you are new to the world of Solus, you can go ahead and grab the download via their website.

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KickassTorrents Becomes One Of The World’s Most Popular Websites

The world of torrent websites is full of constant ups and downs, thanks to the copyright advocates and court rulings. The websites that rule the pirate world a decade ago have been knocked off the charts by newer players.

A decade ago, back in 2007, torrent search engine Mininova and IsoHunt were ruling the charts and The Pirate Bay was at the third place. The next year, The Pirate Bay earned the #1 crown and continued to rule the charts till 2011 with an Alexa rank of 76.

In this period, KickassTorrents, a newer torrent index was gaining popularity and strengthening its #4 position.

In the later years, due to multiple domain switches and court orders, The Pirate Bay lost its top spot and KickassTorrents became the world’s most popular torrent website.

Right from then, KickassTorrents has continued to gain spots on Alexa ranking charts.

Continuing its exponential rise, KickassTorrents entered the Alexa top 70 — a feat that was achieved by Mininova in 2007.

Apart from the legal troubles of The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents also gained from its own impressive uptime, a large library of torrents, and an effective sorting feature.

KickassTorrents is also very easy to navigate with lesser sketchy re-directs as compared to other torrent websites.

KickassTorrents is also empowered by its community who is willing to contribute and help each other — a habit that is fuelled by special ‘unlocked’ achievements.

In other KickassTorrents news, the website recently entered the dark web and got an official .onion TOR domain name. This has given the website owners and users a safe backup option.

So, what do you think? Why KickassTorrents continues to kick ass and rule the world of piracy? Share your views in the comments below.

Hottest Technologies In The Developer Community Right Now

The latest Global Development Survey from the Evan Data Corporation is now out. After surveying 1,441 developers from all across the world, this report outlines various trends of the current technology world.

The report shows that today’s developer community is interested in areas like robotics, cloud, and IoT.

Here are the key takeaways from this report:

1. Priorities of Big Data Analytics Developers:

The report tells that Big Data analytics developers are using their skills to develop applications for Internet of things (15.1%), technical services (10%), telecommunications (10%), manufacturing (non-computer related) (9.6%), and finance/insurance (9.4%).

2.Priorities of Data Mining App Developers:

The data mining app developers are focusing on developing applications for Robotics (56.4%), Arts, Entertainment and Recreation (56.3%), and Automotive (52.9%).

Their other areas of interest are telecommunications (48.3%), Internet of Things (47.1%) and manufacturing (46.7%).

3. Importance of IoT:

Overall, 45% developers say that Internet of Things is a big part of their future plans while 7% say that it’s somewhat important to their strategy. The report shows that 29.5% of all developers are making IoT apps today.

4. Adoption of Cloud:

The increasing popularity of cloud technologies is reflected in this survey. Today, more than ever, 27.4% of all app developers are inclined to develop an app on the cloud.

Out of those, 66.9% are hoping to make a new cloud-based app in next one year. Out of all developers, 81.3% developers are making stuff on the cloud.

Developers are climbing up the ladder that takes them to the cloud due to its various advantages like better security, better user experience, more reliability, cheaper options, and better data center speed.

5. Importance of AI:

41% developers call artificial intelligence a very important part of their future plans. This has become popular due to the new AI firms providing a subscription model, making things easier for independent developers and startups.

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China Makes World’s Fastest Supercomputer With 10 Million Cores And 93 Petaflops Speed

The top 500 ranking of the world’s most powerful supercomputers was introduced 23 years ago. For the first time in history, China has toppled the US to become the country with the most entries on the list. Now, China has 167 machines on the list, compared to the U.S.’s 165.

The new Chinese supercomputer has beaten another Chinese machine that ruled this list for the past three years. Called TaihuLight, this supercomputer is about three times more powerful than the previous record-holder. Compared to the fastest U.S. supercomputer Cray XK7, that ranks 3rd, TaihuLight is five times faster.

The latest supercomputer rankings were released today at International Supercomputer Conference in Frankfurt.

Another important thing about TaihuLight is the use of homegrown Chinese chips. After the U.S. banned the export of Intel chips last year, China decided to use its superconductor technology.

The Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer was developed at the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology (NRCPC). TaihuLight features the Made In China SW26010 processors that are said to be similar to the Digital Alpha chip.

TaihuLight has more than 40,000 chips with 10.65 million processor cores stacked in 40 cabinets. Compared to this, the fastest supercomputer of the U.S. has just 560,000 cores.

This beast showed a capacity of 93 petaflops per second on benchmark tests, which is about three times faster than past record-holder Tianhe-2.

If you think that the U.S. is simply sitting and watching these developments, read the next sentence. The American government has already granted a $200 million contract to Intel and NVIDIA to build a 150 petaflop machine.

How An Engineer’s Little Mistake Nearly Broke The Entire Internet

weden-based internet infrastructure company TeliaSonera is one of the few companies that are responsible for maintaining the basic infrastructure of the internet. TeliaSonera’s transatlantic cable network plays a major role in connecting the US to various European countries.

A recent internet outage has affected many services like WhatsApp, Facebook, Slack, Reddit, and CloudFlare. After this massive outage was reported across many countries, TeliaSonera sent a note to other network operators and informed them about the mishap.

As the problem was affecting a very large chunk of people worldwide, it was assumed that it was due to some damage or cut in some transatlantic cable.

However, as it turned out, the problem was caused due to an engineer’s little mistake. Apparently, he misconfigured an important router and directed all Europe’s internet traffic to Hong Kong.

Now this problem has been fixed by TeliaSonera and things should become normal very soon.

As expected, as a result of this error, TeliaSonera is facing flak from multiple tech giants who are its customers.

Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, one of the biggest content delivery networks around, has called the reliability of TeliaSonera unacceptable.

Did you face any recent internet outage in your area? Share your views in the comments below.

New Chip Makes Parallel Programming Much Easier, Needs Lesser Lines Of Code

Before telling you about an important advancement that could make parallel programming a less tedious job, I would like to tell the beginners about its basics. Parallel programming is a method of performing multiple computations simultaneously. This operates on the principle that a large problem can be divided into smaller fragments, which are then solved together using 2 or more processors.

If you apply your theoretical knowledge, you might think that a multicore machine–let’s say n-core–will be n times faster than a single core machine. However, as a large chunk of computer programs are sequential, breaking them to use parallel computing concept is a tiresome process.

However, the latest developments made at the MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) can change this scenario.

The researchers have created a new chip design named Swarm, which lets them make parallel programs easier to write and operate with more efficiency.

In their tests, the researchers compared the existing parallel programming models with their Swarm versions. They found that Swarm versions were about 18 times faster. Surprisingly, the newly engineered model needed just 10% of the code.

Also, Swarm design was able to speed up one program–that computer scientists had previously failed to parallelise–by a factor of 75.

Explaining how multicore systems are harder to program, Daniel Sanchez, an MIT assistant professor says:

You have to explicitly divide the work that you’re doing into tasks, then you need to enforce some synchronisation between tasks accessing shared data. What this architecture does, essentially, is to remove all sorts of explicit synchronisation to make parallel programming easier.

Compared to the usual multicore chips, Swarm features extra circuits to handle prioritization. The work is performed according to priority and the task with the highest priority gets executed first. These high priority tasks have their low priority task–something that’s automatically slotted into the queue by Swarm.

Writing a program with Swarm functionality is equally easier. When a programmer defines a function, he/she just needs to add a line of code that loads that function into Swarm’s queue.

With inputs from ScienceDaily

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Elon Musk: “Your Tesla Model S Can Also Be Used As A Boat”

Elon Musk is known to make remarks that spark controversy. But, even if you don’t believe the science behind his “Let’s nuke Mars to make it habitable” comment, here’s something you’ll love to believe.

In response to a recent video shared, which shows a man driving a Tesla Model S in a flooded tunnel, Elon Musk said that Tesla Model S floats and becomes a boat for a short period of time.

This boating capability of Tesla was discovered as a firmware Easter egg in early 2015 in the settings menu of the car.

Here’s what Musk had to say:

Here’s the video that everybody’s talking about:

This video also rejects the misconceptions and fears related to electric cars. People often worry about what’ll happen when their electric vehicle will be submerged in water during a flood situation.

Instead, battery powered cars are more efficient than internal combustion engine (ICE) cars in the flood situation. This is so because battery-powered cars don’t have an exhaust pipe.

Talking specifically about Tesla Model S, its drive unit and battery are sealed to keep any kind of liquid out.

However, if you own a Tesla or any other car, avoid testing its boat-turning superpowers for safety reasons. Also, most car warranties don’t cover damages caused due to such hazards.

Did you find this article interesting? Don’t forget to drop your feedback in the comments section below.

Tanmay, World’s Youngest IBM Watson Programmer, Started Coding At The Age Of Five

Tanmay Bakshi, who lives in Canada, is the world’s youngest IBM Watson programmer. To my surprise, he started coding at a very young age of five.

Tanmay has developed an algorithm called “AskTanmay”, which is designed by taking assistance from IBM Watson’s cognitive APIs. It’s the world’s first Web-Based NLQA system.

During his address at the developer conference, he showed how AskTanmay solves queries pertaining to ‘Person,’ ‘Organisation,’ ‘Location,’ or ‘Date’ type.

Tanmay has even open sourced his app to make it more accessible to his fellow developers.

Ever since publishing his first iOS app on the App Store, he has learned new technologies at an exponential rate, becoming fluent in today’s all major programming languages.

He is currently in seventh grade and a co-author of a book called Hello Swift, which teaches the basics of iOS coding to the young learners.

Fedora 24 Released With New Features, Download ISO Files Here

Today, the Red Hat-sponsored Fedora community finally announced the general availability of Fedora 24 Linux distribution. Fedora is one of the most loved open source operating systems out there and the Fedora Project is busy making the experience of the end users ever better.

As expected, the latest Fedora 24 release continues to provide a cutting edge desktop experience by bringing improvements to desktop, cloud, and server. Fedora is a fully open source project whose new release paves a path for the next generation of Linux distributions.

Fedora–favorite Linux distribution of Linus Torvalds–is also the base of widely popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This release Fedora 24 brings some latest features for developers and sysadmins.

Just like the past releases, Fedora 24 constitutes a certain set of base packages that are used to make 3 distinct versions of the OS — Fedora Cloud, Fedora Server, and Fedora Workstation.

Changes and new features in Fedora 24:

Fedora 24 marks the inclusion of glibc 2.23 and GNU Compiler Collection 6. This will result in better stability and code optimization of each version.

Fedora 24 Workstation:

We all know that Fedora plays a vital role in GNOME development and its majority apps are GNOME apps. The Fedora 24 Workstation–the version for desktop users–features GNOME 3.20 that brings along changes like a polished search interface, easier music controls, shortcut windows features, better photo editing, and other little improvements.

GNOME 3.20 also brings a preview version of Wayland, the next-generation input and display technology in GNU/Linux. We should expect that Wayland will be shipped as default in Fedora 25.

The Software app too has got new features that allow you to upgrade to a new Fedora release easily.

Fedora 24 Server:

Fedora Server is the version that comes with applications and packages suitable for running servers.

The latest Fedora 24 Server version is a more streamlined release, with more focus on modularity. As a result, useless packages were removed, making the final installer lighter.

Talking about the major features of the Server release, FreeIPA 4.3 comes as an excellent security information manager.

Fedora 24 Cloud:

Fedora Cloud is a minimal Linux distribution that comes with core cloud technologies and acts as a great platform for running containerized applications.

Fedora 24 Cloud release features OpenShift Origin–a Kubernetes package that makes application development and deployment an easier process.

Fedora 24 Spins, Labs, and ARM:

Alongside these three major versions, Fedora also comes in multiple variants which are built on the same Fedora base. Fedora 24 Spins offers different desktop environments — KDE Plasma, Xfce, LXDE, Mate-Compiz, and Cinnamon.

Fedora 24 Labs comes with software packages for different purposes like Robotics, Games etc.

Fedora Project also releases ARM images for your ARM boards that are now available for download.

Fedora 24 Download Links:

You can download different Fedora 24 versions from the links given below:

Google Hacker Donates His $15,000 Bug Bounty Cash Award To Charity

Tavis Ormandy works at Google and he’s the company’s one of the most respected security researchers. In a recent development, he won a $15,000 bug bounty for finding a bug in Bromium’s–a security vendor–micros-virtualization technology.

However, the Google hacker decided to donate this cash bounty to the Amnesty International organization.

Bromium is known for its Bromium Enterprise Controller that uses micro-VM to protect the organizations against the notorious code executions due to users’ interactions with deceptive links or emails.

To check the security of its product, Bromium ran “The Bromium Challenge” with $15,000 prize money at InfoSec Europe Conference.

According to the company’s blog, over the period of two days, different hackers attacked a PC protected by Bromium’s solution with 189 different instances of malware, 1,500 infected files, and 4,800 websites. Still, nobody was able to crack open the security measures employed by the company.

On the last day of this event, Ormandy contacted Bromium and told the security firm about not one, but two loopholes in their micro-VM-based software.

The Google hacker fooled Bromium’s sandbox and exposed the PC for a possible remote compromise.

After Ormandy donated his $15,000 prize money to the charity organization, Bromium donated an additional $15,000.

Bromium co-founder Simon Crosby has thanked Ormandy for his white-hat professionalism. He expects the charity model to catch on the tech industry.

On the other hand, Ormandy has thanked Bromium for their gesture.

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