Games and Graphics Leftovers

• SHADERed 1.2 Shader Tester Adds Compute Shader Support

  SHADERed is a cross-platform utility designed for creating and testing HLSL and GLSL shaders. This week marked the version 1.2 release of this Windows/Linux program for helping to test and evaluate shaders.

• A Total War Saga: TROY coming to macOS and Linux in 2020

  Feral Interactive today announced that A Total War Saga: TROY, the historical strategy game inspired by the Trojan war, will be released for macOS and Linux next year, shortly after the Windows release. Developed by Creative Assembly and published by SEGA for Windows PC, TROY is the third entry in the Total War Saga series of standalone games inspired by great turning points of history, along with THRONES OF BRITANNIA and FALL OF THE SAMURAI, also brought to macOS and Linux by Feral Interactive.

• DXVK 1.4 released boosting this Vulkan layer to support D3D 11.4

  Developer Philip Rebohle has pushed out another major release of DXVK, the Vulkan to D3D layer used together in Wine and Steam Play. Boasting a new feature set that pumps up the available Direct3D support to 11.4. However, certain optional features are not currently supported like Tiled Resources, Conservative Rasterization and Rasterizer Ordered Views but they may be added if ever needed. This should fix a crashing issue with Plants vs Zombies - Battle for Neighborville, which requires at least D3D 11.3. Additionally, support for DXGI (Microsoft DirectX Graphics Infrastructure) was boosted up to version 1.5 which allows applications/games to check for HDR support but DXVK itself does not currently support HDR. Some games seem to need the interface for HDR to be there even if not used. You should also find the Rockstar Game Launcher working better with this update to DXVK, with new support for GDI interop with DXGI surfaces. Although the launcher does need some other Wine fixes due to a bug in Wine's Direct2D support.

OSS and Openwashing Leftovers

• Why retail marketers must get CX right the first time and how open source plays a key role

  One of the great things about technology is that it has raised all of our expectations. Once upon a time, people worried that controlling their television with a remote would make them lazy. Now, we don't even have to find the remote. We just talk to the TV — literally. We access hundreds of goods and services easily, without leaving the comfort of our chairs: we download games, order the supermarket shop, watch films and read books online. It really is a brave new world. But with new worlds come new challenges, and the challenge of the new, tech-driven, marketplace is to make your business stand out in a global crowd. Of all the businesses in all the world, why should your customers choose (and stick with) you? Lots of people will tell you that the key to gaining market share lies in improving the customer experience. And they'll be right. A combination of the need to impress and increased customer expectations have combined to make CX fundamental to gaining and retaining custom.

• The Future of Great Customer Experience Relies on Open Source

  A majority of U.S. consumers feel that brands don't meet their expectations. The bar for customer experience has been set high -- and its on marketers to reach it. [...] In the early 2000s, enterprise IT was dominated by proprietary software companies. Now, with the rise of public cloud computing, more and more developers are adopting open source tools within their organizations due to lower overall costs and access to the latest innovations. The adoption is spreading from IT into other sectors of the business as well, notably marketing. In total, marketing and experience cloud vendors invested over $8 billion to acquire open source companies in 2018, according to PitchBook.

• ReactOS 0.4.12 Pulls In Wine-Staging 4.0 DLLs, Many Kernel Improvements

  ReactOS, the open-source operating system still striving for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows as a drop-in replacement, has version 0.4.12 now available as its first big alpha update in six months. ReactOS 0.4.12 features a lot of work on its open-source kernel including some driver compatibility enhancements, rewritten write-protecting system images, Blue Screen of Death fixes, and a lot of other low-level work.

• Tencent Offers Open-Source System for IoT Innovation

  Chinese internet giants are quickly cottoning onto the benefits of offering open-source technologies to global developers. Tencent is the latest to throw its hat into the ring. The company announced Wednesday that it is allowing developers to use an open-source operating system to create an internet-of-things (IoT) projects that will allow Tencent to improve the performance of its IoT solutions and strengthen its foothold in the sector. Called “TencentOS tiny,” the operating system is lighter, requires fewer resources, and uses less energy compared with other major systems, according to a Tencent release. The company also said it hopes TencentOS tiny will encourage developers to create IoT projects for smart cities, intelligent connected vehicles, and digital wearables — sectors that Tencent is aggressively targeting.

• WordPress Parent Automattic Raises $300M from Salesforce Ventures

  Automattic, the company behind the open source WordPress content management (CMS) announced on Sept. 19 that it has raised $300 million in a new Series D round of funding. Of note, the entire round was contributed by Salesforce Ventures, bringing total funding to data for Automattic up to $617 million. The Series D marks the first new raise for Automattic since 2014 "This puts us at a post-round valuation of $3 billion, three times what it was after our last fundraising round in 2014," Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic wrote. "It’s a tremendous vote of confidence for Automattic and for the open web."

• Open-source companies gather to gripe: Cloud giants sell our code as a service – and we get the square root of nothing [Ed: So openwashing gets its own summit to sell proprietary software under the false guise of "open"]

• Software Freedom Day

  As part of its social purpose charter, all software released by Purism is free software. That means our software includes a lot of free software created by others–thank you! We make this commitment with a “free software license” that formally grants these freedoms. This means you don’t need to ask us permission to use our software–you already have it. If you are a programmer, you are free to tweak or even overhaul an application. If you are a consultant, you are free to provide supporting services. If you are an everyday user, you are free to choose whoever you like to provide programming and other services, or even learn how to do it yourself.

• How spicy should a jalapeno be?

  Everyone has opinions and preferences, especially when it comes to food. To establish a criterion when answering "How spicy should a jalapeño be?." the Scoville Heat Scale was developed as a standard to measure spiciness. This scale allows people to communicate and share information about how spicy we like our peppers. Similarly, open source technology standards, such as USB, I2C, MQTT, and others, were developed to enable global compatibility. Furthermore, open source hardware platforms have enabled communities to “speak the same language” without reinventing the wheel. For example, Raspberry Pi makes it easy for people to use their hardware as a baseline and then add onto it. This has created a revolution in many industries by enabling individuals, startups, and large corporations to apply hardware and software to complex problems without having to design them from the ground up.

Linux 5.4 Adds Support For The FlySky FS-iA6B - A Receiver Popular With DIY Drones

The input driver updates for the Linux 5.4 kernel include the addition of an interesting, budget-friendly RC receiver that can be used for home-built drones and other use-cases while now the driver allows the receiver when paired with a supported RC controller to serve as a traditional Linux joystick input. The input updates were sent in earlier this week and among the changes are allowing drivers to support more precise timestamps for better velocity tracking, improvements to the BU21013 touchpad driver, and other changes as outlined in the pull request.

Android Leftovers

• Gmail dark mode is coming to Android phones. Turn it on now

• How To Get iPhone Emojis for Android

• I'm switching back to a Pixel because Android 10's privacy features are so important

• Android 10 Comes to OnePlus 7 and OnePlus 7 Pro

• Leak reveals these 48 Samsung phones could get Android 10 update soon

• What to do if the buttons on your Android phone don't work

• Top Android Phones with Snapdragon 855 Plus