Games: Cities: Skylines - Parklife expansion, Supposedly Wonderful Future, Serious Sam 4

• You will be able to build amusement parks, zoos and more in the upcoming Cities: Skylines - Parklife expansion

• Supposedly Wonderful Future, a sci-fi narrative-rich adventure is now available

• Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass teaser trailer revealed, more to be shown at E3

  Croteam is finally starting to give out some basic details on their next game, now called Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass. [...] Given their history with Linux support, I've no doubt it will be on Linux and it will likely be using their newer Fusion engine with Vulkan support.

• Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass Is Coming With Linux Support

  Croteam today released a trailer for their upcoming game Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass. This Serious Sam 4 title will be formally introduced this June at the E3 gaming conference, but for now is the trailer and announcement that more details will be announced soon.

Graphics: AMD, RADV, RadeonSI, Mesa 18.0.1

• AMDGPU DRM Gets "GFXOFF" Patches To Turn Off Graphics Engine

  AMD's Huang Rui has posted a set of 20 patches providing "GFXOFF" support for the AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager Linux kernel driver. GFXOFF is a new graphics processor feature that allows for powering off the graphics engine when it would otherwise be idle with no graphics workload. Obviously, this would equate to a potentially significant power savings with that engine being able to be shut-off.

• RADV Driver Lands Support For Vulkan's New Descriptor Indexing Extension

  Earlier this month with the Vulkan 1.1.72 specification update was the new VK_EXT_descriptor_indexing extension that is quickly being well received by developers. The VK_EXT_descriptor_indexing extension allows for creating large descriptor sets made up of all their combined resources and selecting those resources via dynamic indexes in a shader.

• RadeonSI Now Appears To Support "RX Vega M" With Intel Core CPUs

  One of the most common Linux hardware questions I've received dozens of times in the past few weeks alone has been over the support for "RX Vega M" Vega-based graphics processors found on select newer Intel Kabylake CPUs. It appears RadeonSI at least should now support these Radeon graphics on Intel CPUs.

• mesa 18.0.1

• Mesa 18.0.1 Released With A Number Of Fixes

  In addition to Mesa 17.3.9 being released today, Mesa 18.0.1 also rolled out the door as the first point release to last quarter's Mesa 18.0 series. Mesa 18.0.1 features improvements to its Meson build system support, several RADV Vulkan driver fixes, various fixes to the Gallium3D Nine (D3D9) state tracker, various Intel driver fixes, several core Mesa improvements, and then the other random smothering of fixes collected over the past few weeks.

Programming: nGraph Compiler, JavaScript Trademark, PyPI and Pip

• Intel Opens Up nGraph Source Code For DNN Model Compiler

  Intel tonight announced they are open-sourcing their nGraph compiler code, which serves as a framework-neutral deep neural network model compiler. Intel claims with nGraph and Xeon Scalable hardware that researchers can obtain up to 10x performance improvements over previous TensorFlow integrations, as one example. Besides TensorFlow, nGraph also supports PyTorch, MXNet, Neon, Caffe2, and CNTK while also planning to support other frameworks moving forward.

• Why it's finally time to give up on the name JavaScript

  An iOS developer has apparently received a cease and desist notice from Oracle over the use of the word "JavaScript" in the title of their app. The developer, Tyanya Software, shared the notice on perennial internet soapbox Reddit to seek advice on how to fight the order. [...] If user reviews are any indication, the app is not even particularly good, with reviewers stating things such as "Not ready for production," "Does not work as advertised," and "Waste of money, don't buy this." The last update to the app was in 2014, which the changelog notes was only an upgrade to add support for iOS 8. The app developer is at least honest about the intent behind the unwieldy name for the app, saying in a Reddit comment that "we game the App Store ranking by adding all the keywords to the app name." While Oracle has a duty to protect their trademarks, this type of legal bludgeoning underscores a historical problem that has been left unaddressed for too long: JavaScript is a terrible name for the thing being described. It has nothing to do with Java, an actual product developed by Sun (now owned by Oracle). JavaScript was developed at Mozilla, and the name was changed during beta releases of Netscape Navigator 2.0 from "LiveScript" to "JavaScript." It has, for some time, caused confusion among casual web users about the difference between Java and JavaScript. Given that ECMAScript is also a trademarked term, it seems best to revert to calling the language "LiveScript" to undercut trademark-related legal posturing. [...] Oracle declined to comment on this story.

• New PyPI launched

  The new PyPI has been launched. Browser traffic and API calls (including "pip install") have been redirected from the old pypi.python.org to the new site. The old PyPI will shut down on April 30. LWN covered the new PyPI last week.

• Pip 10.0 has been released

  The release of pip 10.0 has been announced. Some highlights of this release include the removal of Python 2.6 support, limited PEP 518 support (with more to come), a new "pip config" command, and other improvements.

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