Archive for the ‘Free Software’ Category

The InfoQ eMag – The InfoQ Software Trends Report 2019: Volume 1 – InfoQ.com

This eMag is part of our 2019/2020 trends overview. The insights come from our editorial team, all of whom are software engineers, who push the barrier of innovation in their professional lives. Read and reflect on their insights to inspire your tech visions and roadmap for 2020.

At InfoQ we are passionate about software. Our team of regular editors and contributors all have full-time jobs in the software industry, building software and managing software teams. Our mission is to facilitate the spread and change of innovation in professional software development. We do this through the content we publish online via InfoQ and a number of other platforms including YouTube, Apple News, Alexa, as well as in-person through the various QCon conferences we run around the world.

To help guide our content, groups of our editors meet regularly to discuss the global content strategy for InfoQ and the technology trends that significantly impact our industry. During these discussions, we consider the state of practice, emerging ideas and things we hear within our network and at meetups, conferences, analyst events, etc. We also take into account traffic patterns on the site and attendance at sessions at QCon and other industry conferences as well as, where possible, publicly accessible surveys, our own reader surveys and other data.

The output from these discussions is a series of topic graphs, based on a technology adoption curve, which we use to inform our content policy.

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The InfoQ eMag - The InfoQ Software Trends Report 2019: Volume 1 - InfoQ.com

2019 DraftSight Free Download: Is There a Full Free Version? – All 3DP

The correct answer to the question of whether there is a full free version of DraftSight would be Yes, but or No, but depending on your point of view.

DraftSight is a professional CAD platform that focuses primarily on technical 2D and 3D CAD drawings. Developed by the French software company Dassault Systmes, this high-grade software solution is regularly used by architects, engineers, professional CAD designers, students, and even ambitious hobbyists.

With DraftSight, users can create, edit, view, and revise 3D and 3D DWG files with immense accuracy and speed. It has an easy-to-use interface that can quickly be mastered, allowing for a clean transition from other commonly used CAD programs. DraftSight also enables you to compare designs, add hardware symbols and other features, and append PDFs to the project file.

Depending on your experience level and needs, there are three versions of DraftSight that are available: DraftSight Standard, DraftSight Professional, and DraftSight Premium.

Unsurprisingly, the pricier versions offer greater capabilities and more features, so the best choice really all comes down to how you plan to use DraftSight. Like most professional CAD software, the latest version of DraftSight, which is aptly called DraftSight 2019, is not free. However, it still presents itself as a much more affordable option compared to costly alternatives like AutoCAD.

That doesnt mean you have to spend your hard-earned cash just to give this 2D CAD software a test drive. Thankfully, users can access the full version of DraftSight 2019 through a 30-day free trial. Furthermore, as of December 2019, theres also a Beta version of DraftSight 2019 that Mac and Linux users can use for free at least for the time being. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be a free or discounted version for students and teachers.

If you want to learn more about DraftSight and its features before committing to the free trial version, continuing scrolling to find out more about the features. And, if you want to delve further into 2D CAD but the cost of DraftSight is outside of your budget, well also turn you onto three DraftSight alternatives that are completely free.

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2019 DraftSight Free Download: Is There a Full Free Version? - All 3DP

Native verification tools for the blue checkmark crowd – Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard

Among the many differences between older social software and post-Facebook social software is the peculiar flatness of the newer platforms. Older tools recognizing that the user of social software is the group, not the individual empowered those invested in health of communities with tools to help keep the community healthy. Effective social software was oriented not toward the average member of a community, but toward the communitys stewards. Thats why, for example, Wikipedia foregrounds to users an array of information useful to making quick judgments about editors, edits, and claims on articles History tab. Its why the bread and butter of community blogging systems was different levels of trusted user status, and why BBS tools showcased moderation features over user capabilities.

Platforms split community management from community activity, and were still feeling the effects of that. Wikipedia has a half dozen different access levels and at least a dozen specialized roles. Twitter has one role: user. But even though specialized formal roles dont exist, different patterns of influence do, and this has been woefully underutilized in the fight against misinformation.

Thats why my prediction for the coming year is that at least one platform will engage with its most influential users, giving them access to special tools and training to identify and contextualize sources and claims in their feeds. This will allow platforms to split the difference between a clutter-free onboarding for Aunt Jane and a full-featured verification and sourcing interface for users whose every retweet goes out to hundreds of thousands of people, or whose page or group serves as an information hub for users and activists. These tools and training will also eventually be released to the general public, though for the general public, they will default to off.

Until recently, most online communities put resources into making sure that those with influence had tools to exercise that influence responsibly, built right into the main interface. Its time for platforms to follow suit.

And heres a bonus prediction, this one for online information literacy. Over the past few years, much of the focus in infolit has been on trustworthiness, truth, and bias. While the truth sometimes is clear cut, and the intentions of those working in media literacy are good, putting these things at the core of any large public initiative can be problematic. Trustworthiness, for example, is often seen through an explicit news agenda, where journalistic processes are seen as a platonic ideal to which other types of information should aspire. Bias, if anything, ends up being too powerful a tool, allowing students to filter out almost any publication as unworthy of their attention.

For the past several years, weve been taking a different tack. Weve been asking students a simple question: What context should you have before engaging with a particular piece of content? And if you share this content, what context should you provide to those with whom you share?

While weve been doing this for its pedagogical benefits, a recent public project has made me realize that it is an approach uniquely sensitive to community values, and, as such may provide a starting point for broad educational initiatives. Truth is a battleground, trustworthiness a minefield. Yet even in these divided times, most people agree that one should know the relevant context of what one reads and shares. Its as close to a universal value as we have these days.

Because these issues will become more salient as broader adoption is pursued, I predict that online information literacy initiatives will begin to pivot from trust as an organizing principle to the reconstruction of missing context.

Mike Caulfield is head of the Digital Polarization Initiative of the American Democracy Project.

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Native verification tools for the blue checkmark crowd - Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard

The best remake of 2019 just got even better as Resident Evil 2 ditches controversial DRM – TechRadar

If you didnt buy the Resident Evil 2 reboot on PC because of the DRM it was shackled with, then we have some good news: Capcom has stripped out the Denuvo anti-tamper tech from the game.

As reported by DSO Gaming, the decision was made by the Japanese team to ditch the Denuvo DRM, which is a controversial antipiracy system. Mainly because games are seemingly cracked pretty swiftly anyway, so really its the genuine gamers who and up suffering the inconvenience

An inconvenience which, at least according to anecdotal reports weve previously seen on Reddit, may include a slight frame rate slowdown, at least on lower-spec PCs although we have to treat such speculation with a great deal of caution.

That said, the DRM definitely uses some resources, its just a question of whether that workload might have any realistically noticeable performance impact or not as weve seen previously in other releases, there remain allegations levelled at the Denuvo software in terms of potentially slowing load times and frame rates.

At any rate, those who may have been holding off buying whats one of the best games of 2019 because of that DRM, need hold off no longer.

We rated Resident Evil 2 very highly in our review, praising the stunning graphics of the remake, and concluding that its a masterful modern survival horror experience. And now a masterful modern survival horror DRM-free experience, to boot.

You probably also saw that the Resident Evil 3 remake has just been officially announced, and will arrive on April 3, 2020 complete with a 1v4 multiplayer offering.

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The best remake of 2019 just got even better as Resident Evil 2 ditches controversial DRM - TechRadar

Researchers criticize AI software that predicts emotions – The London Free Press

SAN FRANCISCO A prominent group of researchers alarmed by the harmful social effects of artificial intelligence called Thursday for a ban on automated analysis of facial expressions in hiring and other major decisions.

The AI Now Institute at New York University said action against such software-driven affect recognition was its top priority because science doesnt justify the technologys use and there is still time to stop widespread adoption.

The group of professors and other researchers cited as a problematic example the company HireVue, which sells systems for remote video interviews for employers such as Hilton and Unilever. It offers AI to analyze facial movements, tone of voice and speech patterns, and doesnt disclose scores to the job candidates.

The nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center has filed a complaint about HireVue to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, and AI Now has criticized the company before.

HireVue said it had not seen the AI Now report and did not answer questions on the criticism or the complaint.

Many job candidates have benefited from HireVues technology to help remove the very significant human bias in the existing hiring process, said spokeswoman Kim Paone.

AI Now, in its fourth annual report on the effects of artificial intelligence tools, said job screening is one of many ways in which such software is used without accountability, and typically favoured privileged groups.

The report cited a recent academic analysis of studies on how people interpret moods from facial expressions. That paper found that the previous scholarship showed such perceptions are unreliable for multiple reasons.

How people communicate anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise varies substantially across cultures, situations, and even across people within a single situation, wrote a team at Northeastern University and Massachusetts General Hospital.

Companies including Microsoft Corp are marketing their ability to classify emotions using software, the study said. Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday evening.

AI Now also criticized Amazon.com Inc, which offers analysis on expressions of emotion through its Rekognition software. Amazon told Reuters that its technology only makes a determination on the physical appearance of someones face and does not claim to show what a person is actually feeling.

In a conference call ahead of the reports release, AI Now founders Kate Crawford and Meredith Whittaker said that damaging uses of AI are multiplying despite broad consensus on ethical principles because there are no consequences for violating them.

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Researchers criticize AI software that predicts emotions - The London Free Press