Galicia continues promotion of free software

The government of the autonomous region of Galicia (Spain) will continue to encourage the use of free and open source software solutions in the public and private sector. This week, the government published the ‘Free Software Plan 2017’, outlining 110 actions. In its ‘Plan de acción software libre 2017’, Galicia announces new initiatives to promote sharing and reuse of ICT solutions. The government is to share new software solutions, but will also emphasise the reuse of existing tools, pointing to Mancomún, the region’s software repository, the catalogue maintained by the Spanish central government’s Centre for Technology Transfer, and to the European Commission’s Joinup eGovernment portal.

Linux Devices: Raspberry Pi, PIC32, Lime Micro

• Apollo Lake COM Express module has onboard microSD and eMMC

  The COM Express Compact Type 6 “MSC C6C-AL” taps Intel’s Apollo Lake and offers up to 16GB DDR3L, microSD and optional eMMC, plus support for 5x PCIe slots.

• How to create an Internet-in-a-Box on a Raspberry Pi

  If you're a homeschool parent or a teacher with a limited budget, Internet-in-a-Box might be just what you've been looking for. Its hardware requirements are very modest—a Raspberry Pi 3, a 64GB microSD card, and a power supply—but it provides access to a wealth of educational resources, even to students without internet access in the most remote areas of the world.

• Squeeze Pi: Adventures in home audio

  The Squeezebox Touch provided a family-friendly interface to access our music library, either directly on the device or via a range of mobile applications. Logitech discontinued its development in 2012, but I was happy as they open sourced the Squeezebox's server software as Logitech Media Server and supplied the open source code used on the physical Squeezebox devices.

• Evaluating PIC32 for Hardware Experiments

  PIC32 uses the MIPS32 instruction set. Since MIPS has been around for a very long time, and since the architecture was prominent in workstations, servers and even games consoles in the late 1980s and 1990s, remaining in widespread use in more constrained products such as routers as this century has progressed, the GNU toolchain (GCC, binutils) has had a long time to comfortably support MIPS. Although the computer you are using is not particularly likely to be MIPS-based, cross-compiling versions of these tools can be built to run on, say, x86 or x86-64 while generating MIPS32 executable programs.

• Want a Raspberry Pi-powered PC? This $50 case turns the Pi into a desktop

  As long as you keep your expectations in check, it's perfectly feasible to run the latest Raspberry Pi as a desktop computer. However, the base Raspberry Pi 3 is a bare bones board, so anyone wanting to set it up as a desktop PC will need to buy their own case and other add-ons.

• Open source LimeNET SDR computers run Ubuntu Core on Intel Core

  Lime Micro has launched three open source “LimeNET” SDR systems that run Ubuntu Core on Intel Core CPUs, including one with a new LimeSDR QPCIe board. Lime Microsystems has gone to Crowd Supply to launch three fully open source LimeNET computers for software defined radio (SDR) applications. The systems run Ubuntu “Snappy” Core Linux on Intel’s Core processors, enabling access to an open, community-based LimeSDR App Store using the Ubuntu Core snap packaging and update technology. The SDR processing is handled by three variations on last year’s open source LimeSDR board, which run Intel’s (Altera) Cyclone IV FPGA.

Android Leftovers

• Google explains why Android apps still aren't on Chromebooks

• Exclusive: Here’s a closer look at Lenovo’s upcoming Moto G5S

• Android O: All the best features in Google's latest OS update

• Audi Displays Android OS in their Cars at Google Conference

• Apple just launched a new attack on Android

• Why the First Nokia-Branded Android Phones Are Promising in Many Ways

• Combination of features produces new Android vulnerability

Server: Data Centres, Google, SDN, Amazon, and Microsoft

• Data Center Networking Performance: New Apps Bring New Requirements

  Large cloud services providers such as Amazon, Google, Baidu, and Tencent have reinvented the way in which IT services can be delivered, with capabilities that go beyond scale in terms of sheer size to also include scale as it pertains to speed and agility. That’s put traditional carriers on notice: John Donovan, chief strategy officer and group president at AT&T technology and operations, for instance, said last year that AT&T wants to be the “most aggressive IT company in the world.” He noted that in a world where over-the-top (OTT) offerings have become commonplace, application and services development can no longer be defined by legacy processes.

• Google Reveals a Powerful New AI Chip and Supercomputer

  The announcement reflects how rapidly artificial intelligence is transforming Google itself, and it is the surest sign yet that the company plans to lead the development of every relevant aspect of software and hardware. Perhaps most importantly, for those working in machine learning at least, the new processor not only executes at blistering speed, it can also be trained incredibly efficiently. Called the Cloud Tensor Processing Unit, the chip is named after Google’s open-source TensorFlow machine-learning framework.

• Google's AlphaGo AI is about to face off against the world's best Go player

  This week, the matter will be settled once and for all. Ke Jie and AlphaGo will face off in a three-game match in Wuzhen, China, as part of the Future of Go Summit being held by Google.

• Keynote: Cloud Native Networking- Amin Vahdat, Fellow & Technical Lead For Networking, Google

• Google's Networking Lead Talks SDN Challenges for the Next Decade

• Peace, love and SDN

  Virtualization has been a blessing for data centers – thanks to the humble hypervisor, we can create, move and rearrange computers on a whim, without thinking about the physical infrastructure. The simplicity and efficiency of VMs has prompted network engineers to envision a programmable, flexible network based on open protocols and REST APIs that could be managed from a single interface, without worrying about each router and switch.

• Bryan Cantrill on Integrity

  Amazon has 14 leadership principles and integrity is not on it.

• Bankrupt school ITT pleads 'don't let Microsoft wipe our cloud data!'

  The estate of bankrupt US trade school ITT Technical Institutes is today asking a court to stop Microsoft from erasing its cloud data. In a filing [PDF] to the US District Bankruptcy Court of Southern Indiana, the caretakers of the defunct for-profit university seek an order to bar the Redmond giant from wiping the contents of ITT's Office 365 and webmail accounts for students, faculty, and administrators.