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Heres the Christmas gift for the photography enthusiasts. Darktable 3.0 has just released.

Darktable is one of the best applications for editing RAW images on Linux. You can consider it as a free and open source alternative to Adobe Lightroom.

Darktable 3 is a major new release with tons of feature improvements and a complete rework of the user interface. The GUI is now completely controlled by GTK+ CSS rules, which makes the whole GUI themable. There are eight themes available by default.

With the help of over 3000 commits and 553 pull requests, the new release has fixed 66 bugs and added many new features.

Lets see what features this new release brings.

Here are the highlighted new features:

You can read about all the changes in the release notes on GitHub.

Lets see how to get the latest Darktable release.

Darktable is available in Ubuntu but you wont get the latest release immediately. For the LTS version, it may take months before you have this version update.

Worry not! Darktable provides its own PPA to install the latest release on Ubuntu-based distributions.

Unfortuntaley, That Darktable PPA has not been updated with the new release.

Worry not (again)! Thanks to our friend Ji M of Ubuntu Handbook, we have an unofficial PPA for easily installing Darktable 3.0 on Ubuntu and other Ubuntu based distributions.

Open a terminal and use these commands one by one:

To remove Darktable installed via this PPA, you can first uninstall the application:

And then remove the PPA as well:

You may wait for your distribution to provide this new release through the software manager.

You may also download the tarball or the entire source code from the GitHub release page (its at the bottom of the page).

With Darktable 3, you can edit your holiday pictures better 🙂

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Original post:
Darktable 3 Released With GUI Rework and New Features - It's FOSS

Well, what a year it has been for Android users. A real rollercoaster with the highs of Android 10 and all the exciting new features and security improvements included as part of that free upgrade, followed by the devastating onslaught of malware and scams that have plagued the operating system. Millions have been put at risk due to sophisticated attacks lurking within the Google Play Store, fake apps found online, and other terrifying threats.

If you're sat reading this wondering, "hang on, I don't remember any of these warnings" firstly, where have you been? And more importantly, it's worth having a trawl through some of the apps on your Android-powered smartphone or table to ensure one of these dangerous scams isn't residing on your device.

Thankfully, Google has been working hard to remove these threats as they're discovered by security firms and enterprising users. But while that means nobody else will fall pray of the apps more often than not built by cybercriminals to siphon-off your private information or make money by generating impressions for advertisements on your handset those who already have fallen fowl will need to manually kill the software themselves.

That can be a problem in itself since one of these dangerous apps was capable of quietly reinstalling themselves onto your device after you've tried to purge them from your Android operating system. Downloaded 45,000 times in the last six months alone, the software known as Xhelper can hide itself on your handset to avoid detection. And even if you do manage to locate it on your smartphone and delete it, the nefarious app can reinstall itself without your permission. Worse yet, it seems to be spreading fast.

According to research by security firm Symantec, there was an average of 131 devices infected each and every day in November 2019, with an average of 2,400 devices persistently infected throughout the month. The malware appears to mostly affect users in India, United States of America, and Russia.

Suitably spooked? You should be, according to the research from Symantec.

The app has even been observed re-installing itself onto users smartphones after they uninstall it. Xhelper is designed to stay hidden by not appearing inside your Android smartphones launcher, so scrolling through the list of apps wont help.

All this to say, its a really nasty piece of software.

However, there is some good news. For starters, Symantec hasnt detected any instances of Xhelper originating from the Google Play Store. So, if you only download apps and games from the Google-operated digital marketplace, then youre extremely unlikely to be infected by the dangerous app.

According to Symantec, its own anti-virus solution will identify Xhelper as Android.Malapp. Symantec, which owns Norton anti-virus, or similar anti-virus solutions will be able to strip-out the dangerous app for good.

That said, Android users should be wary of anti-virus apps and unfamiliar developers who promise to fix their malware issues as a number of these have been discovered to be elaborate hoaxes to infect your device. Yes, the very apps that you're hoping will solve any problems with your handset are being used to make it much, much worse.

The report issued by security research firm VPNpro at the end of October claimed that, in total, these apps amassed a whopping 1.9 billion downloads. So why exactly are these apps so bad? Well, VPNpro said the programmes used permissions agreed to during its set-up process to collect and sell a users personal data. It also noted malware could be spread using these permissions, too.

Read more here:
Android warning: All the dangerous apps and scams around this year you need to AVOID - Express

One of the popular open-source libraries in machine learning, TensorFlow provides a suitable abode with essential tools for ML researchers and developers in order to perform SOTA machine learning applications. According to a survey, this library is one of the most loved deep learning frameworks.

In this article, we list down 10 free resources to learn TensorFlow in 2020.

Note: The list is in alphabetical order

About: Advanced Machine Learning (ML) with TensorFlow on Google Cloud Platform Specialization is a course in Coursera offered by Google Cloud. This course is a little advanced for beginners and is meant for those who already entered the machine learning arena. In this course, one can learn the hands-on experience in optimising, deploying, and scaling production ML models of various types. One will also learn how to build scalable, accurate, and production-ready models for structured data, image data, time-series, and natural language text.

Click here to learn.

About: This free course is provided by the tech giant IBM where one can learn the basic concepts of TensorFlow like starting with a simple Hello World example, its main functions, operations, and the execution pipeline. One can also learn how to explain foundational TensorFlow concepts such as the main functions, operations and execution pipelines. It also helps in understanding how TensorFlow can be used in curve fitting, regression, classification and minimization of error functions. Additionally, it helps in understanding how to apply TensorFlow for backpropagation to tune the weights and biases while the neural networks are being trained and other such.

Click here to learn.

About: The course Deep Learning with TensorFlow 2 and Keras mainly focuses on hands-on exercises. It contains the exercises and their solutions in the form of Jupyter notebooks. To learn this course one needs to have enough knowledge in Python and its libraries such as NumPy, Matplotlib, Jupyter, and TensorFlow. Also, this course requires Python 3.5 or Python 3.6.

Click here to learn.

About: This course in Coursera is offered by deeplearning.ai where one can learn the best practices for using TensorFlow. One will also get to learn to build a basic neural network in TensorFlow, training of a neural network for a computer vision application and understanding how to use convolutions in order to improve the neural network.

Click here to learn.

About: Intro to TensorFlow for Deep Learning by TensorFlow is a free course in Udacity where one can learn how to build deep learning applications with TensorFlow. This course is basically a practical approach to deep learning for software developers. Here, one can learn hands-on experience building the state-of-the-art image classifiers and other deep learning models.

Click here to learn.

About: Introduction to TensorFlow Lite by TensorFlow Lite is a free course in Udacity offered by the Tensorflow Lite team. This course is basically a practical approach to model deployment for software developers. In this course, one can learn hands-on experience with the TensorFlow Lite framework, along with deploying deep learning models on Android, iOS, and even an embedded Linux platform.

Click here to learn.

About: Learning TensorFlow is an e-book by Tom Hope, Yehezkel S. Resheff & Itay Lieder. In this book, one can learn how to run TensorFlow, how to use it to build deep learning models, and how to train deep learning models for computer vision, and natural language processing (NLP). It will also help the students to learn how to scale TensorFlow and use clusters to distribute model training and much more.

Click here to learn.

About: This course Machine Learning with TensorFlow on Google Cloud Platform Specialization is offered by Google Cloud in Coursera. In this course, one can learn the basics of machine learning and the problems it can solve. One will also learn how to write distributed machine learning models that scale in Tensorflow. It also helps the student in scaling out the training of those models by offer high-performance predictions and other such.

Click here to learn.

About: This free tutorial is provided by Stanford University in Github. In this course, one can learn the fundamentals and contemporary usage of the Tensorflow library for deep learning research. It also helps in understanding the graphical computational model of TensorFlow and helps in exploring the functions it has to offer. It also teaches how to build and structure models best suited for a deep learning project and much more.

Click here to learn.

About: This tutorial is provided by the TensorFlow team on their official website. The tutorials are written as Jupyter notebooks and run directly in Google Colab. It is beneficial for both the beginners and advanced practitioners as one can start learning from the very basic to advanced customisation, as well as distributed training.

Click here to learn.

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A Technical Journalist who loves writing about Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. A lover of music, writing and learning something out of the box. Contact: ambika.choudhury@analyticsindiamag.com

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10 Free Resources of TensorFlow One Must Learn In 2020 - Analytics India Magazine

Were nearly into a new decade and its a good idea to think about which shares are going to do well for years into the future and base our investment decisions on that long-term thinking.

Its impossible to know what share is going to do well next week or next month, all we can do is judge what is a good share price to buy at.

Were nearly into a new decade and its a good idea to think about which shares are going to do well for years into the future and base our investment decisions on that long-term thinking.

Its impossible to know what share is going to do well next week or next month, all we can do is judge what is a good share price to buy at.

When you think of investments in terms of years its much easier to get a grip on where the earnings are headed and where the share price is probably going to go. Its also good when you can find businesses themselves that are thinking long-term.

These three shares are ones Id want to buy for their high chance of dominance in the 2020s:

Altium is aiming to become the dominate provider of electronic PCB design software. Its offering is mission critical for various organisations to design their products or machinery to work effectively.

Management of Altium are aiming to dominate the PCB software industry like Microsoft changed and dominated the Office software space. Thats why the company is aiming for 100,000 Altium Designer subscribers over the next five years which should help generate US$500 million of revenue.

The great thing about a business like Altium is that as its revenue grows it costs dont grow as fast, leading to growing profit margins and increasing profits.

Altium is also aiming to keep its balance sheet debt free whilst growing dividends for shareholders. Its a great business for a number of reasons.

If there has been one business on the ASX that has shown what brand power can do, its A2 Milk. It has created a powerful image in the publics mind as being higher-quality than its competitors, which allows it to charge higher prices and generate higher returns.

It has become a huge player in Australia and now its got its eyes set on the US and further growth in China. Then theres every other country that A2 Milk isnt currently being sold in.

I think that A2 Milk has a very long growth runway, despite its years of growth already. New products and new countries could mean that A2 Milk is one of the best non-tech ASX shares to buy today for the long-term.

You wouldnt think that a building products business could produce large returns, but its generating long-term consistent growth which makes excellent compounding returns.

Its industrial property trust continues to grow in value whilst also seeing rising rental profit. Its investment in Washington H. Soul Pattinson and Co. Ltd (ASX: SOL) continues to deliver rising earnings and dividends.

What Im most excited about is Brickworks US expansion America is a huge market and Brickworks has rapidly built a market-leading position in the north east of the country.

Brickworks should also benefit in the shorter-term as Australias construction cycle swings back to good times again.

I think each of these businesses are on track to deliver excellent returns in the 2020s. Brickworks could deliver the most dependable returns because of its diverse divisions, but I think if things go Altiums way it will generate the largest returns because of the rapid growth of the technology and its growing profit margins.

If youre after some more market-beating ideas Id definitely want these top stocks in my portfolio.

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Motley Fool contributor Tristan Harrison owns shares of Washington H. Soul Pattinson and Company Limited. The Motley Fool Australia owns shares of and has recommended Washington H. Soul Pattinson and Company Limited. The Motley Fool Australia owns shares of A2 Milk. The Motley Fool Australia has recommended Brickworks. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. This article contains general investment advice only (under AFSL 400691). Authorised by Scott Phillips.

Read more here:
3 ASX shares to dominate in the 2020s - Motley Fool Australia

The enterprise software industry is a river of constant change. New development methodologies, changing approaches to platform mechanics and the continual enhancement of existing toolsets and functions mean that were always looking to better the innovations of the last 12 months with increased power and functionality.

Good software vendors are very transparent about their immediate future roadmaps. This helps customers plan their upgrade paths and predict their own commercial development roadmaps.

Traditionally then, given this constant drive to improve, the end of the year has always served as a fitting time to lay down some informed conjecture detailing the most likely areas for development going forward. So what can we expect from technology and software in 2020?

In terms of key trends and game changers, lets consider the fact that weve been able to encapsulate a good deal of the internal mechanics of software engineering and present them in the form of low-code/no-code tools. These technologies allow us to condense the guts of coding into an abstracted upper layer. Users can drag-and-drop or use natural human language commands to create varying degrees of functionality.

This revelation in coding allows non-technical, or at least less technical,users to bring software functions together and create business applications without taking a degree course in software engineering.

The rise of low-code/no-code is significant for a number of reasons. First, the planet doesnt have enough developers to keep pace with the demand for enterprise software, so giving business professionals the ability to create applications even of the most basic form is fundamentally important. Second, this development means we can free up our software engineers to work on new and emerging innovations in areas like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and, perhaps soon,quantum computing that offers the potential to process exponentially more data compared to classical computers.

Looking forward into 2020 and beyond, we will see that low-code/no-code has lowered the barrier to entry for creating applications. The challenge now is getting users to physically put their hands on a keyboard and start touching these tools. Its like DIY, once you pick up a toolbox and get your hands dirty, you realise how much you can achieve.

Things are changing in business value metrics too. When we look at the union of developers and operations inside DevOps, our focus over the last decade has been mostly dedicated to increasing development and deployment velocity. Forrester however predicts that business value will now overtake velocity as a favoured DevOps metric.

So value today doesnt just mean money and financial terms of trade anymore. It means value in terms of how fast a business can change and adapt. It also means how much value you have delivered to your customer. Some measures of new value will be quantitative measures that we can track quite accurately, but others will be qualitative and much harder to track based on a measure of sentiment and human feeling.

While were on human emotive experiences, lets consider the fact that, slightly paradoxically, the rise of AI will allow us to be more human. As we apply AI-based efficiencies to an increasing number of workplace tasks, we are able to take a hands-off approach to many of the repeatable and definable tasks that AI is so good at shouldering.

We will witness a positive development in the number of human touch jobs and roles. Technology analysts suggest that masseurs sports, therapeutic or the more exotic kind will be the last people to ever see their jobs changing due to AI robots. But other human touch roles will also flourish. Jobs that need human empathy, intuition and randomness of thought will be able to grow and develop.

What all this means is that we will be able to apply more of our own individual humanistic approach to the way we carry out work. Work itself will become more experiential and less like a collection of tasks that need to be checked off. This will allow us more time to do a better job for any given task. If were baking a cake, it will be richer, more lustrous, and with extra toppings.

Conveniently for those who wish to jump on the marketing tagline opportunity, 2020 will be the year of 20:20 software. This term describes software applications and services that have a clear vision for which data sources they need to be connected to ensure that timely information gets to the right place for business decisions to be made.

The rise of 20:20 software gives us the chance to get a new and much more accurate view of what resources we need in line with own personal work tasks. This allows us to focus on the things that really add value to the business. There is a natural hierarchy here as task alignment for individuals becomes connected intelligence for teams, then departments and then entire businesses. What used to be top-down management now becomes a user-first bottom-up growth cycle where creativity is championed from the start.

So will we still be talking about digital transformation in 2020? Yes, of course we will. But 2020 will really be the year that the rubber hits the road. Now that so many businesses have made significant moves to cloud platforms and services, we can start to learn more from best practices and, crucially, shared practices to make work and life better for everyone.

Link:
The road ahead for software in 2020 - Diginomica