Some people think you need expensive hardware to have fun playing video games, but the truth is, you don't. Believe it or not, there are plenty of free games that can run well on a fairly meager PC. No, I am not just talking about emulating classic video games (piracy is bad, mmkay). Actually, there are some really fun PC games that you can legally download at no charge.

One such popular game is SuperTuxKart. This open source Mario Kart clone is totally FREE on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It can even be had on Android too. Rather than use Nintendo mascots, the racers in SuperTuxKart are based on open source projects -- it is quite cute. The game even has network support these days, so you can have a multiplayer experience over the internet. SuperTuxKart recently reached version 1.2, and the new version is chock full of improvements. The developers are also sharing their plans for the future of the game.

"SuperTuxKart development efforts will continue in the 1.x series, with another release targeted in a few months. While not as catchy as brand new tracks, gameplay mechanics or graphics effects, the changes will once again improve player experience. Beyond more polish, development on Vulkan support is planned to begin as well as general improvements in the rendering engine for more performance. We have also sent another e-mail to previous contributors for the dual-licensing of STK code, with a more detailed background," says theSuperTuxKart developers.

The devs further explain, "After this, our focus will switch to a 2.0 release that will deliver many new or overhauled tracks, gameplay changes, and much more. The work on improved tracks has already begun. SuperTuxKart is a free open-source game that depends on community contributions. There is no shortage of things to work on for programmers and 3D artists alike. How quickly the next releases will come and how much content they bring might also depend on you!"

But enough about the future, what about the present? The developers share the following changes in SuperTuxKart 1.2.

If you want to trySuperTuxKart 1.2, you can download it from Sourceforgehere. Apparently, having the game hosted on Sourceforge is controversial (people complain about everything), so it is now also available on Microsoft's GitHub here.

Photo credit:Roman Kosolapov /Shutterstock

Originally posted here:

Open source Mario Kart clone SuperTuxKart 1.2 is FREE on Windows, Mac, and Linux - BetaNews

Hackers Can Turn Off Your Dell Servers Remotely Using the Newly Found iDRAC Vulnerability - Researchers who found the path transversal vulnerability also found hundreds of exposed servers via the internet.

Nutanixs Hyperconverged Infrastructure Comes to AWS - The worlds second most popular HCI software now available as a service running in AWS data centers.

New RISC-V CTO On Open Source Chip Architectures Global Data Center Momentum - With more big international players on board, the foundation's new head of technology sees signs of "state of the art moving forward."

Renewed Interest in OpenStack Bare Metal Project Ironic, as Software Moves Closer to Hardware - "As long as we have access to x86 or Arm, we can run Linux, and Linux can run anything."

Is Kubernetes Changing Data Centers in Perceptible Ways? - Containerization has promised to carry the torch further after virtualization catalyzed a re-imagining of the data center. Has it delivered?

Equinix Enters India with a $161M Mumbai Data Center Acquisition - Acquires local provider GPXs network-dense two-data center campus

GitHub delivering open source code for safekeeping at its Arctic Code Vault on a Norwegian island in the Arctic Ocean.

GitHub's Arctic Vault Makes Sure Open Source Code Survives the Apocalypse - In early July, GitHub deposited 186 kilometers of photographic film, containing 21TB of digitized snapshots of all the public-facing code in its repository, to its underground Arctic Code Vault, located on a Norwegan island in the Arctic Ocean.

Will Growth at the Edge Shrink the Core? - When a human population spreads out, it tends to spread thinner. Will computing capacity follow the same pattern?

IBM Watson AI to Help CBRE Manage Client Data Centers - AI, augmented reality, and analytics technology will provide remote management and predictive maintenance support globally.

A Volkswagen plant in Zwickau, Germany

Industry-Tailored Clouds Give Platforms More Marketplaces They Can Run - Their internet marketplaces under regulatory scrutiny, Google, Amazon, and others are building more ecosystems but of a different kind.

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Top 10 Data Center Stories of the Month: August 2020 - Data Center Knowledge

Dijon Kizzee was 29 years old.

By NewsOne Staff

Police in Los Angeles on Monday shot and killed a Black man after officers stopped him while riding a bike for what was being described as a bicycle code violation, sparking a night of protests in Californias biggest city.

The victim was identified as Dijon Kizzee and witnesses have reportedly blamed the Los Angeles Sheriffs Department (LASD) for overreacting.

However, the LASD attempted to justify the killing by claiming when they accosted the 29-year-old, he dropped a gun, ran away and ultimately assaulted an officer before he was shot. There is graphic cell phone footage on social media showing portions of the encounter, which prompted protests into Tuesday morning.

The LASD said Kizzee was carrying an armful of clothes but that he dropped them before he fled, revealing a gun among the apparent laundry. It was unclear if riding a bike while carrying the clothes was the purported violation Kizzee was stopped for, but one witness told CBS Los Angeles that he posed no threat to the officers.

He had a towel and he had his clothes and his pants couldnt even stay up, so thats what made him slow down so they had enough to get him, the woman who granted anonymity said. They didnt have to shoot him more than 5 times, they could have shot him one time in the leg.

She continued:Whats the use of having the prison system if yall are just gonna kill us? What are yall here for? Who are you protecting?

Police offered a different narrative with varying chronology.

Our suspect was holding some items of clothing in his hands, punched one of the officers in the face and then dropped the items in his hands, Lt. Brandon Dean said. The deputies noticed that inside the clothing items that he dropped was a black semiautomatic handgun, at which time a deputy-involved shooting occurred.

The Los Angeles Times reported the sequence of events happening a bit differently:

When the deputies attempted to contact the man, he dropped the bicycle and ran north on Budlong for one block with deputies in pursuit, Dean said. In the 1200 block of West 109th Place, deputies again tried to make contact with the man, and he punched one of them in the face, Dean said.

In doing so, the man dropped a bundle of clothing he had been carrying. The deputies spotted a black handgun in the bundle, Dean said, and both opened fire, killing the man.

According to the Open Source Intelligence news website, at least 2 officers began unloading their weapons after Kizzee panicked, punched one officer, and started fleeing. While running away, Dijon dropped his clothes, and in the process, a black semiautomatic handgun fell to the ground with the articles of clothing.

LASD said reports of as many as 20 shots being fired were untrue.

The identity of the officers involved in Kizzees killing was not immediately revealed.

Protesters took to the streets and marched to LASD headquarters after the shooting and chanted phrases like Black Lives Matter, Say his name and No justice, no peace.

It was unclear where on his body Kizzee was shot, but one consistency with the differing narratives is that he was struck while running away, suggesting he could have been hit in the back.

Kizzees death is the most recent instance of apparently preventable police violence against Black people and follows last weeks shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Blake, also 29, was shot in the back multiple times while attempting to enter his vehicle on Aug. 23.

This is America.

This article originally appeared on NewsOne.

Looking to Advertise? Contact the Crusader for more information.

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LA Cops Shoot And Kill Dijon Kizzee Following Alleged 'Bicycle Code Violation' | The Crusader Newspaper Group - The Chicago Cusader

Co-developed solution bridges the gap between devops and securityoperations teams

HONG KONG, CHINA - Media OutReach - August 28, 2020 - (; ), the leader in cloud security, today announced plans for a new,co-developed solution with Snyk, the leader in developer-first opensource security. The joint solution will help security teams managethe risk of open source vulnerabilities from the moment open sourcecode is introduced without interrupting the software deliveryprocess. This marks the expansion of a strategic partnership that has already helped countless organizations enhance DevOpssecurity without impacting product roadmaps.

"We know that vulnerabilities in open source software, which isincreasingly used by all development teams, have increased 2.5x inthe past three years," said Geva Solomonovich, Global AlliancesCTO."This partnership is ground-breaking because for thefirst time it is giving the security operations team visibilityinto Open Source, which is one of the fundamental building blocksof cloud native applications, and its risk. Through thiscollaboration we will be helping bridge the technology, process andorganizational gap between security operations and devops teams."1

According to Gartner, "Open-source libraries can carry significantvulnerabilities and the fact that developers may not even know acomponent is embedded within a library exposes them to unseenvulnerabilities."2

"DevOps sits at the beating heart of innovation-first enterprisesand no one knows these teams like Snyk, especially when it comes topreventing open source vulnerability threats," said Kevin Simzer,chief operating officer for Trend Micro. "What we are putting intoplay is effectively a virtual open source cybersecurity expert tothose teams running our Cloud One platform. Together we can solvesecurity issues before they occur, with complete coverage from codecreation to runtime and across any type of developer environment."

The latest capabilities, delivered by combining the strengths ofboth companies, enables teams to find vulnerabilities in opensource code automatically and immediately. It offers significantbenefits for security and development teams, including helping tosupport compliance with ISO 27001, SOC 2 and other key frameworksand standards.

The joint solution will help create fundamental mind shifts incollaboration, driving closer alignment between security anddeveloper teams. It will be available as part of the Trend MicroCloud One platform, for additional details visit: http://www.trendmicro.com/cloudone. For an overview of the partnership visit: http://www.trendmicro.com/snyk.

1 Snyk, Inc.; 2020 State of Open Source Security: https://info.snyk.io/sooss-report-2020

2 Gartner, Inc.; Hype Cycle for Application Security, 2020, July2020 | G00448216

Snyk is a developer-first security company that helps organizationsuse open source and stay secure. Snyk is the only solution thatseamlessly and proactively finds and fixes vulnerabilities andlicense violations in open source dependencies and containerimages. Snyks solution is built on a comprehensive, proprietaryvulnerability database, maintained by an expert security researchteam in Israel and London. With tight integration into existingdeveloper workflows, source control (including GitHub, Bitbucket,GitLab), and CI/CD pipelines, Snyk enables efficient securityworkflows and reduces mean-time-to-fix. For more information or toget started with Snyk for free today, visithttps://snyk.io.

Trend Micro, a global leader in cybersecurity, helps make the worldsafe for exchanging digital information. Leveraging over 30 yearsof security expertise, global threat research, and continuousinnovation, Trend Micro enables resilience for businesses,governments, and consumers with connected solutions across cloudworkloads, endpoints, email, IIoT, and networks. Our XGen securitystrategy powers our solutions with a cross-generational blend ofthreat-defense techniques that are optimized for key environmentsand leverage shared threat intelligence for better, fasterprotection. With over 6,700 employees in 65 countries, and theworld's most advanced global threat research and intelligence,Trend Micro enables organizations to secure their connected world http://www.trendmicro.com.hk.

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Trend Micro and Snyk Significantly Expand Partnership with Technology Collaboration to Solve Open Source Development Risks - AsiaOne

Earlier this summer, Monday.com released a new kind of app-building experience on its platform. The core insight is relatively simple: If you dont like your workflow, you can change it.

Though many workflow systems allow for user customization, few have achieved the level of configurability found in the Tel-Aviv-based companys new release. In a way, the app framework brings the modularity and broad functionality of an iOS, Androidor Windows operating system to a destination site for getting work done.

The Monday system itself is built around the concept that, as a work operating system, you can choose and build the workflow that you like, like putting Lego bricks in place to build something majestic, said Matt Burns, a startup ecosystem leader at the company.

One benefit of the new framework, according toDipro Bhowmik, a technical success lead on the appframework, is a low-code environment that allows users with virtually no software experience to curate their workspaces.

You can choose and build the workflow that you like, like putting Lego bricks in place to build something majestic.

Prior to the release of the appframework, Bhowmik said, users could choose from a selection of pre-installed apps and integrations, including embedded Zoom calls, a whiteboard, a pivot table, an online document viewerand a working status feature all released in March with the intention of creating a better experience for people working from home.

Now, Monday.com has gone one step further in its bid to be the workplace OS of choice, with building blocks for others to create apps hosted on itssite.

More on Emerging Product MarketsOpen Door Is Speeding Up Plans to Digitize Home Buying

For trained developers, the framework offers sophisticated app customizationoptions not only the APIs and tools to access Monday.com data ontheir platformsusers, Bhowmik said, but the capability to upload their own code to Mondays infrastructure, where it is hosted and maintained as part of a monthly service agreement. This allows companies to scratch-build customized board views, widgets and integrations that are presented to users as native features.

So, tomorrow, if you wanted to build a new board view, youd be able to build a web application and upload your code to our servers, Bhowmik said. We would serve it for you; you would use the software development kit to make your API calls. You wouldnt have to worry about any kind of authentication, because we handle that for you.

The real power of the system, though, lies in its interoperability. Just as an iPhone allows a user to employ the phones ecosystem to run a Spotify app,Monday.com ispositioning itself as an accessible host for a range of existing and yet-to-be-built external apps, including those of potential competitors,Burns explained.

The folks who are building these apps could be anyone from hobby developers who just have a cool idea and want to build something and show it off to the world,to folks who want to build an entire business.

One look at theintegrations on Monday.coms website and you get a sense of the scope of its ambitions. The list includesSlack, Zendesk, Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, Jira, Asana, Trello, GitHub, Dropbox and several common G-Suite apps, among many others.

The software is written in JavaScript, but it is compatible with virtually all coding programs and languages. As of June, more than 100 apps had been built by external partners and customers, 20 by Monday.com itself,and the app framework was in use by 8,900 weekly active users.

The folks who are building these apps could be anyone from hobby developers who just have a cool idea and want to build something and show it off to the world, to folks who want to build entire businesses, Bhowmik said.

As more companies move to remote work, the app framework can reasonably be seen as a strategic objective in a broader turf war between Monday.com and its near-market competitors to claim ownership of the digital workspace. The end game for Monday.com, as a recent press release indicates, is a world where software serves as a central hub and OS for any kind of work.

Or, as Burns puts it: Whereas Windows is an operating system that works for your computer, we want to be the brain of the business, where we can collect, digest, translate and transparently show you all that information.

Its hardly any secret that companies like Slack and MURAL are vying for similar territory. As of May,Slackreporteda record 12.5 millionsimultaneously connected users, including at least 65 of the Fortune 100 companies, with a total active use ofmore thanone billion minutes each weekday. MURAL just raised $118 millionin Series B funding,tripled annual revenue year over yearand added more than a million monthly active users.IBM, Intuit, Atlassianand Autodesk each have up to tens of thousands of MURAL members collaborating with the product each month,the briefing reported.

Many of these platforms focus on integrating applications and visualization tools to recreate the meetings, sprints and strategy sessions that commonly took place not so long ago in the physical office.

Whereas Windows is an operating system that works for your computer, we want to be the brain of the business.

In that sense, Monday.com is no different. Valued at nearly $2 billion with $130 million in annual recurring revenue, the company works with 100,000 teams around the globe, from cattle ranchers to digital agencies to enterprise clients like Walmart, Adobe and General Electric. Where some other software workplace tools specialized, Burns told me aiming to be the best plumbing software for plumbers Monday widened its lens, adopting a more universal design vernacular.

When he was first introduced to CEO Roy Mann at the corporate headquarters in Tel Aviv in 2016, Burns said, Mann told him the widespreadproblem companieswere facingwasthe breakdown of team collaboration through silos a view Burnsshared.

The solution offered by Mann, however, caught him off guard. It was not the traditional business school tract to find a niche and own it but, instead, to create a tool that could unify disparate teams, from employees at small- and medium-sized firms to enterprise teams that dont normally collaborate closely.

The market potential of that untapped space convinced Burns, a former independent marketing consultant for healthcare providers, that it was time to make the jump. One of his first clients, which he describedas a luxury hotel for breeding steers, strengthened his convictionthat the platform had far broader appeal than competing workplace tools.

Each item in their board was a different cow they were tracking as [the cows]moved to different farms, he said. His next thought was this: Oh my God, this can be used for absolutely anything.

Now, Monday must prove its solution is the best one for the job.

More on Remote Workplace ToolsWhat Sets MURAL, Miro and Invisions Freehand Apart?

Speedhas been key to Mondaysdevelopment approach. The company devised plans for the appframework in early 2020, but when COVID-19 arrived unexpectedly, Mondayaccelerated the release cycle. What was supposed to happen duringthe course of several weekshappened in a two-day hackathon over Zoom that resulted in 20 new apps.

Eighteen invited clients and partners participated. One of them was KPMG, a global tax advisory and auditing company headquartered in the Netherlands.

KPMGdevelopedan internal smart document reader that can scan and extract invoice numbers and other pertinent information from financial documents. But the company confronted a question faced by countless software firms: How could itmake the tool more accessible for users in the context of their actual workflows?

During the hackathon, KPMGhit on a solution: an integration that allows a customer to upload a document directly into Monday.com, where it is securely processed through the embedded smart document reader and, within seconds, sent to a Monday.com board.

This is really a new generation of tools that we're seeing, which are using a work operating system to empower what people are doing every day.

To the end user, the value of the integration is convenience. You dont have to go into another tool and upload that information. You dont have to be dealing with three or four different windows at once. Its all seamless, Bhowmik said.

Thats an obvious advantage to companies like KPMG, who want to create a more frictionless experience for their customers. Its also a strategic victory for Monday.com, which can keep people locked into its operating system.

We want to make it so you can spend all your time in the Monday.com work OS, Bhowmik said. Do all your work, or as much as you can, there, and have that information either fed in from other tools that your team uses, or sent from Monday.com to those other tools, so the rest of your team has visibility.

Companies in the United States and internationally are starting to experiment with the new app framework. The Paris-based open-source CRM and e-commerce company Synolia developed a visualization tool that monitors team members progress during a sprint, reporting results in a chart. The Dubai-based software consulting company Cloud Concept, meanwhile, built a document generator app that can take a basic invoicing template, populate it with a customer list harvested from Monday.com and produce invoices to distribute to customers.

It remains unclearwhat kindof workplace apps will emerge as more developers begin tinkering with the platform and whether the app frameworkwill make Monday.com the go-to command center in agrowing market for digital workplace tools.

But Burns, at least, is openly bullish about the frameworks prospects: Its not like were replacing technology that people are using and seeing out there. Were building something different.

View post:

Monday.com Wants to Be Your Only Open Tab at Work - Built In

Todays organizations desire the accessibility and flexibility of the cloud, yet these benefits ultimately mean little if youre not operating securely. One misconfigured server and your company may be looking at financial or reputational damage that takes years to overcome.

Fortunately, theres no reason why cloud computing cant be done securely. You need to recognize the most critical cloud security challenges and develop a strategy for minimizing these risks. By doing so, you can get ahead of problems before they start, and help ensure that your security posture is strong enough to keep your core assets safe in any environment.

With that in mind, lets dive into the five most pressing cloud security challenges faced by modern organizations.

According to Gartner, the shift to cloud computing will generate roughly $1.3 trillion in IT spending by 2022. The vast majority of enterprise workloads are now run on public, private or hybrid cloud environments.

Yet if organizations heedlessly race to migrate without making security a primary consideration, critical assets can be left unprotected and exposed to potential compromise. To ensure that migration does not create unnecessary risks, its important to:

Effectively managing and defining the roles, privileges and responsibilities of various network users is a critical objective for maintaining robust security. This means giving the right users the right access to the right assets in the appropriate context.

As workers come and go and roles change, this mandate can be quite a challenge, especially in the context of the cloud, where data can be accessed from anywhere. Fortunately, technology has improved our ability to track activities, adjust roles and enforce policies in a way that minimizes risk.

Todays organizations have no shortage of end-to-end solutions for identity governance and management. Yet its important to understand that these tools alone are not the answer. No governance or management product can provide perfect protection as organizations are eternally at the mercy of human error. To help support smart identity and access management, its critical to have a layered and active approach to managing and mitigating security vulnerabilities that will inevitably arise.

Taking steps like practicing the principle of least privilege by permitting only the minimal amount of access necessary to perform tasks will greatly enhance your security posture.

The explosive growth of cloud computing has highlighted new and deeper relationships between businesses and vendors, as organizations seek to maximize efficiencies through outsourcing and vendors assume more important roles in business operations. Effectively managing vendor relations within the context of the cloud is a core challenge for businesses moving forward.

Why? Because integrating third-party vendors often substantially raises cybersecurity risk. A Ponemon institute study in 2018 noted that nearly 60% of companies surveyed had encountered a breach due to a third-party. APT groups have adopted a strategy of targeting large enterprises via such smaller partners, where security is often weaker. Adversaries know youre only as strong as your weakest link and take the least path of resistance to compromise assets. Due to this, it is incumbent upon todays organizations to vigorously and securely manage third-party vendor relations in the cloud. This means developing appropriate guidance for SaaS operations (including sourcing and procurement solutions) and undertaking periodic vendor security evaluations.

APIs are the key to successful cloud integration and interoperability. Yet insecure APIs are also one of the most significant threats to cloud security. Adversaries can exploit an open line of communication and steal valuable private data by compromising APIs. How often does this really occur? Consider this: By 2022, Gartner predicts insecure APIs will be the vector most commonly used to target enterprise application data.

With APIs growing ever more critical, attackers will continue to use tactics such as exploiting inadequate authentications or planting vulnerabilities within open source code, creating the possibility of devastating supply chain attacks. To minimize the odds of this occurring, developers should design APIs with proper authentication and access control in mind and seek to maintain as much visibility as possible into the enterprise security environment. This will allow for the quick identification and remediation of such API risks.

Weve mentioned visibility on multiple occasions in this article and for good reason. It is one of the keys to operating securely in the cloud. The ability to tell friend from foe (or authorized user from unauthorized user) is a prerequisite for protecting the cloud. Unfortunately, thats a challenging task as cloud environments grow larger, busier and more complex.

Controlling shadow IT and maintaining better user visibility via behavior analytics and other tools should be a top priority for organizations. Given the lack of visibility across many contexts within cloud environments, its a smart play to develop a security posture that is dedicated to continuous improvement and supported by continuous testing and monitoring.

Cloud security is achievable as long as you understand, anticipate and address the most significant challenges posed by migration and operation. By following the ideas outlined above, your organization will be in a much stronger position to prevent and defeat even the most determined adversaries.

See the article here:

Five critical cloud security challenges and how to overcome them - Help Net Security

If you have ever seen those effects in some images or screenshots shown in other angles and perspectives and you dont know how to do it, or it seems very difficult to do it with an editing program like Photoshop or GIMP, this website is for you.

Or, if you just want to make an image look more interesting or professional and transform it without much effort, youre going to want to take a look at Limus, a free and extremely easy-to-use tool for just that.

Limus is a tool to transform images, it works like a web application and you can use it to rotate any image on three different axes: X and Z. You can also adjust the perspective, position, and scale.

The options are all in the same toolbar, which also gives you options such as add a shadow and adjust its vertical axis or its level of blur. Limus also lets you round the edges of the image, and replace the background color with any hexadecimal color.

If you want you can leave the background transparent or upload another image to use as a background. If you have problems adjusting your image in any of the axes with the sliders in the toolbox, you can press the SHIFT key and the app will go into free transform mode, that is, to rotate it simply by dragging with the mouse pointer.

Limus is an open source project and its source code can be found on GitHub under an MIT license. There you will find instructions to clone the app and host it yourself if you wish.

Share On this website you can easily give a fairly professional 3D effect to any image

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On this website you can easily give a fairly professional 3D effect to any image - Explica

As we learned from the previous two blog posts in this series, Public Clouds have set the pace and standards for satisfying Data Scientist's technology needs, but on-premise offerings are starting to be viable using innovations such as Kubernetes and Kubeflow.

but it still can be hard!

With expectations set very high in Public Cloud, ML platforms delivered on-premise by IT teams have been made even more difficult because the automation flows and their associated tooling to power these, have been well-hidden behind public cloud customer consoles and therefore, the process to replicate these is not very obvious.

Even though abstraction technologies, such as Kubernetes, reflect and relate well to the underlying infrastructure, the education needed to bridge current Data Center skills over to cloud native tools takes enthusiasm and persistence in the face of potential frustration as these technology 'stacks' are learned and mastered.

Considering this, the Cisco community has developed an open source tool named 'MLAnywhere' to assist with the skills needed for cloud native ML platforms. MLAnywhere provides an actual, usable deployed Kubeflow workflow (pipeline) with sample ML applications, all of this on top of Kubernetes via a clean and intuitive interface. As well as addressing the educational aspects for IT teams, it significantly speeds up and automates the deployment of a Kubeflow environment including many of the unseen essential aspects.

How MLAnywhere works

MLAnywhere is a simple Microservice, built using container technologies, and designed to be easily installed, maintained and evolved. The fundamental goal of this open-source project is to help IT teams understand what it takes to configure these environments whilst providing the Data Scientist a usable platform, including real world examples of ML code built into the tool via Jupyter Notebook samples.

The installation process is very straight forward - simply download the project files from the Cisco DevNet repository, follow the instructions to build a container using a Dockerfile, and launch the resulting container on an existing Kubernetes cluster.

MLAnywhere layers on top of technologies such as the Cisco Container Platform, a Kubernetes cluster management solution. Cisco Container Platform greatly simplifies both day-1 deployment, and day-2 operations of Kubernetes and does so in a secure, production-grade and fully- supported fashion.

Importantly for ML workloads, Cisco Container Platform also eases the burden of having to align GPU drivers and software as MLAnywhere uses the Cisco Container Platform provided APIs to seamlessly consume the underlying GPU resources upon the deployment of the supporting Kubernetes clusters, and exposes these into the Kubeflow tools.

So what's in it for IT Operations teams?

For IT teams, clear descriptive explanatory steps are presented within the ML interface for deploying the relevant elements, including the all-important logging information to help educate the user on what is going on under the surface, and what it takes within the underlying Kubernetes platform to prepare, deploy and run the Kubeflow tooling.

Not forgetting the Data Scientists

On the Data Scientist's side, many will have experience using traditional methodologies in the ML space and therefore will see the benefits that container technology can bring in areas such as dependencies, environment variables management and GPU driver deployments. But importantly, they get to do this whilst leveraging the scale and speed that Kubernetes brings, from the comfort of the abstraction away from the infrastructure, and still uses well known frameworks such as Tensorflow and Pytorch.

As the ML engineers and data scientists are generally more concerned about getting access to the actual dashboards and tools than the underlying plumbing, appropriate links are provided within MLAnywhere to the Kubeflow interface as the environments are dynamically built out on-demand.

What does the future hold?

Hopefully you can see that MLAnywhere can bring quick and instant value to various teams involved in the ML process with a focus on the educational aspects helping Data Scientists and IT Operation teams make the transition over to cloud native methodologies.

Moving forward, we will continue to add further nuggets of value into MLA but an important aspect to point out is we intend to merge this project with another Cisco initiative around Kubeflow called 'The Cisco Kubeflow Starter Pack' as these two complementary approaches when combined, will bring their best aspects together into a compelling open source project.

Finally, we will leave you with a practical note, a well used phrase in the ML world is 'it takes many months to deliver an ML platform into the hands of data scientists', MLAnywhere can do this in less than 30 minutes!!

For more information and to download: The MLAnywhere code repository and installation instructions

Catchup with part 1 and part 2 in this series.

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Cisco : Tools to Help You Deliver A Machine Learning Platform And Address Skill Gaps - Marketscreener.com

Sometimes its all too easy to get lost in your web browser while trying to get work done.

Once youve buried yourself under dozens of browser tabs, youre constantly having to pick through them all to find your way back to Gmail or Google Docs. Or instead of trying to track down the sites youve already got open, you just open them again in a new tab, creating even more clutter.

As they say in infomercials, theres a better way. By making some changes to your web browser, you can more easily access the websites you use most and cut down on tab overload. Here are a few things to try:

Instead of loading your favorite websites as browser tabs, consider converting them into apps that mimic the behavior of desktop programs.

These web apps will launch in their own separate window, without the address bar, bookmarks, and other menu clutter youd normally get in your browser. Best of all, you can launch them straight from the Windows taskbar or Start menu, or from the dock in macOS, so you dont have to go fishing for them in a sea of browser tabs. I use this trick for Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Keep, Chrome Remote Desktop, Airtable, and the free Photoshop alternative Pixlr E, and it has fundamentally changed my workflow.

Heres how to turn a website into an app in Chrome:

Creating web apps in Microsoft Edge is slightly easier:

If youre using Windows, the new app will appear in the Start menu under Recently Added. You can then drag it to your pinned apps section in the Start menu, or add it to the Windows taskbar by right-clicking the app while its open.

If youre on a Mac, the new app will automatically show up in your dock. Drag it anywhere on the dock to keep it there permanently.

Sidekick is an alternative web browser that makes web apps easier to access. It offers a persistent left-hand sidebarhence the namewhere you can pin icons for Gmail, Slack, Google Docs, Trello, Mailchimp, Notion, and dozens of other popular web services. Essentially, its an app dock for your browser, letting you load your favorite sites without having to open them as browser tabs. (The browser itself is based on Chromium, the same open-source code that Google uses for Chrome, so it also supports all the same browser extensions.)

After installing Sidekick, you can add new apps by hitting the + icon in the sidebar. To make the sidebar smaller to fit more apps on the screen, click the gear icon, then adjust the sidebar size slider.

Sidekick also uses your browser history to provide shortcuts within each web app. Right-clicking the Google Docs icon, for instance, brings up a list of recent documents to launch. Right-clicking on Trello lets you jump into recent cards or boards. And for those websites you do open as browser tabs, Sidekick will remember them, so you can close the browser without losing your progress.

Sidekick is free to use, but an $8-per-month Pro subscription is required if you want to have multiple workspaces with their own app docks, such as one for personal apps and another for work.

If switching to a new browser seems too extreme, you can still use a browser extension to keep your tabs under control. Workona is an extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge that organizes tabs into workspaces that you can view and search through from a single menu. Its an alternative to splitting up your tabs into separate windows for different tasks.

Installing the extension adds a permanent Workona tab to the left side of your browser. From there you can view all of your workspaces, move tabs between them, and add separate bookmarks for each workspace. You handle all of this by dragging and dropping your tabs around.

Workonas menu also has an app dock, where you can add popular web apps. Once an app is in the dock, you can click on it to bring up shortcuts, such as a list of recent documents in Google Drive or links to your boards in Trello. You can also access these shortcuts through Workonas search bar.

Best of all, Workona is great at remembering what youre doing. If you pin a tab in your web browser, it will make that tab available in all of its workspaces. That means you can pin sites such as Gmail or Slack and never lose track of them. The extension will also save any tabs youve opened after closing the browser and will sync them across devices so you can pick up where you left off from anywhere.

Workona is free to use, but youre limited to 10 workspaces without a $6-per-month Pro subscription.

Read more from the original source:

How to work faster in your web browser - Fast Company

All Things Open, the largest open-source event in the Southeast, is bringing its two-day conference experience online this fall. Held on October 19-20, All Things Open 2020 is expected to draw thousands of designers, developers, entrepreneurs and technologists worldwide.

Now entering its eighth consecutive year, All Things Open is a pillar of the Triangles tech ecosystem. The event takes place in Raleigh every fall and, in recent years, it has amassed crowds of over 4,000 people from around the world. Last years conference brought in the largest turnout ever, with 4,985 attendees from 41 states and 27 countries. The 2018 program drew 4,079 attendees.

All Things Open Founder Todd Lewis is optimistic that the turnout will likely double for the virtual iteration of the program. Hes expecting more than 10,000 developers, technologists and open-source leaders from around the world to join. We are removing the travel barrier, so we expect a more global audience, Lewis adds.

Though the online venue will naturally change the end-attendee experience, Lewis believes All Things Open 2020 can come close to replicating the in-person atmosphere. Being virtual will allow us to do some thingsnot possible when in person and will allow us to feature speakers we never would have otherwise been able to host, Lewis says.

For the first time ever, tickets to this years event are completely free. Previously, All Things Open tickets would start at around $150. Though attendees can be admitted for free in 2020, VIP tickets with extra perks are also available.

Three co-located events will take place on day one (October 19) of All Things Open 2020:

Lewis says that these three sub-events, in addition to the more traditional keynote, workshop and track session programming, will provide more variety to attendees than ever before.

Day two of All Things Open will include several 15-minute plenary talks and keynotes, along with 45-90 minute sessions in multiple content tracks.

Ahead of October, organizers are busy finalizing the schedule and roster of speakers. All Things Open aims to have more than 200 open-source technologists and subject matter experts in the speaker lineup. Over 100 people have been announced so far, including developers, managers and executives from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Spotify, RedHat, SAS, GitHub, Fidelity Investments, PayPal and more major tech firms.

Lewis says that the team is structuring sessions and sub-events to maximize the attendee experience and allow for ample education and networking. The online event platform, he adds, is intuitive and easy for attendees to navigate.

The platform were using will really help connect people and enable new relationships and communication, Lewis said. These new relationships have long-tail value and can benefit attendees for years into the future.

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All Things Open expects to draw thousands worldwide for all-digital conference - WRAL Tech Wire