Today in Techrights

• Amazon’s Patent Policy Should be Enough of a Reason to Boycott Amazon and AWS
• Don’t Use Cloudflare Because You Impose This on People Who Least Want It
• How Many/Most EPO Examiners View ‘President’ António Campinos
• Techrights’ Priorities Over the Years
• Courts in Disagreement: Warning on Wrongly-Granted European Patents and the Looming Collapse of All Software Patents in Europe
• Computing Will Not Necessarily Make the World a Better Place
• Links 17/2/2019: Compiz 0.9.14.0, Geary 0.13.0, GNU FreeDink 109.6, Debian 9.8, Texinfo 6.6

today's leftovers

• What is my Linux Distro of Choice?

• GNU World Order 13x8

• Here’s what Linux backup and restore for Chromebooks looks like, expected in Chrome OS 74

  A few weeks ago I pointed out a new feature targeted for Chrome OS 74: A native way to backup and restore Linux apps and data on Chromebooks that support Project Crostini. Since then, the Chromium team has made a big push to nail down the functionality in advance of the Chrome OS 74 feature freeze date, which is February 22: Aside from the code to support backups and restores, there was a slew of interface work done this week.

• Sparky Online

  There is a new, small tool available for Sparkers: Sparky Online.

• Chromium is eroding the Open Web and it’s our responsibility to stop it

   

  Edge’s move to Chromium means that the balance of power has tipped further towards a single party who can increasingly become the arbiter of which ideas should be developed, which standards should be accepted and which usability concerns matter the most. The seats at a W3C meeting should not be 70% filled by Chromium-based platforms, nor should Google have veto powers on open source projects.  

  Such a monopoly hamstrings innovation, and the resultant complacency has consequences. Whilst it may be great for developers to have one less rendering engine to worry about, we and our users are still paying the price for Internet Explorer’s market domination circa 15 years ago.

• Use an 8-char Windows NTLM password? Don't. Every single one can be cracked in under 2.5hrs [Ed: Sounds like a 'feature' for NSA access]

• Freedreno Picks Up OpenGL Compute Support For Adreno A6xx Hardware

  The newest addition to the Freedreno Gallium3D driver for open-source 3D on Qualcomm graphics hardware is enabling OpenGL compute support for A6xx series hardware.  Freedreno already ships compute support for Adreno A5xx hardware while now for Mesa 19.1 the support has landed for the latest-generation A6xx hardware.

Software: 14 Excellent Free Plotting Tools and Texinfo 6.6

• 14 Excellent Free Plotting Tools

  A plotting tool is computer software which helps to analyze and visualize data, often of a scientific nature. Using this type of software, users can generate plots of functions, data and data fits. Software of this nature typically includes additional functionality, such as data analysis functions including curve fitting. A good plotting tool is very important for generating professional looking graphics for inclusion in academic papers. However, plotting tools are not just useful for academics, engineers, and scientists. Many users will need to plot graphs for other purposes such as presentations. Fortunately, Linux is well endowed with plotting software. There are some heavyweight commercial Linux applications which include plotting functionality. These include MATLAB, Maple, and Mathematica. Without access to their source code, you have limited understanding of how the software functions, and how to change it. The license costs are also very expensive. And we are fervent advocates of open source software. The purpose of this article is to help promote open source plotting tools that are available. To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 14 excellent plotting tools. Many of the applications are very mature. For example, gnuplot has been in development since the mid-1980s. The choice of plotting software may depend on which programming language you prefer. For example, if your leaning towards Python, matplotlib is an ideal candidate as it’s written in, and designed specifically for Python. Whereas, if you’re keen on the R programming language, you’ll probably prefer ggplot2, which is one of the most popular R packages. With good reason, it offers a powerful model of graphics that removes a lot of the difficulty in making complex multi-players graphics. R does come with “base graphics” which are the traditional plotting functions distributed with R. But gpplot2 takes graphics to the next level.

 

• [GNU] Texinfo 6.6 released

  We have released version 6.6 of Texinfo, the GNU documentation format.