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The editing field has been dominated by Adobe Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro X for years now. However, the price-tag can be enough to put some filmmakers on low budgets off.

Avid is trying to tap into this market of students and aspiring professionals with the introduction of a free version of Media Composer to try.

Marketed as the tool that your favourite filmmakersuse, the streamlined version, Media Composer First, aims to introduce a new audience to their software by offering many of the same tools and benefits as the professional version.

But, while thetemptation of free kit could be enough to sway you, it depends on what you need your editing software to do and what you want to do with it.

>> Read:Videographers beware: Apple kills off Final Cut Pro 7 with new update.

Obviously, given that the software is free, there are going to be some limits of what you can do.

For example, Avid claims that, in Media Composer First, project formats can produce output up to 1080p while the professional version carries up to 4K.Input footage at 4K is compatible but depending on your kit, it might not offer the final product you want.

The software also offers four video tracks and eight audio tracks in comparison to 24 and 64, respectively, in the full version.

These features would suit filmmakers working on smaller scale projects that do not require 4K formats.

However, for aspiring videographers, this free software could be just what you need. Avid claims it offerstools to fix problems like shaky camera footage and bad lighting alongside audio and sound effect mixing.

The highly competitive field of editing software means that videographers have plenty of choice, withDaVinci Resolve another contender alongside Adobe Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro X. But, its all about finding the software to suit what you need.

Or if youre happy with the editing software you already have, take a look at our guide on how to edit 4K video on old computers.

You can download Media Composer First now on Avids website.

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Avid looks to oust Adobe and Apple with free editing software - The Video Mode

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union banks facing increasing competition from financial technology firms could find it easier to invest in software under rule changes being discussed with regulators.

EU banking rules treat software as a cost rather than an investment, forcing lenders to cover expenditure on digital applications with an equal amount of capital.

But with banks threatened by a growing number of cyber attacks and under pressure from nimble new entrants to the sector, regulators are now considering changes.

The Commission services are in a dialogue with stakeholders to gain a better understanding of the interaction between accounting and prudential treatment of software, a European Commission spokeswoman told Reuters.

We will envisage appropriate action if needed.

The Commission, which proposes laws at the EU level, shied away from the issue in an overhaul of banking rules last year, despite lobbying from banks in the region.

If expenditure on software, which amounts to roughly half of banks total digital investment, were treated in the EU as it is in the U.S. it could free up more than 20 billion euros ($24 billion)in capital this year alone, one banking lobbyist said.

It would help immensely if the Commission recognized the importance of this issue, Wim Mijs, head of the European Banking Federation, said.

Many European banks have been slow to invest in adapting to rapid changes in the way consumers use technology for finance, with so-called fintech firms starting to steal market share in a variety of sectors from payments to lending.

Fintech companies have also attracted the money needed to develop new technologies, with global investment worldwide in the sector more than 100 billion dollars at the end of 2016, data cited by the Bank for International Settlements shows.

Although fintech is still relatively small, the BIS warned of the increasing challenge it poses to banks, which have in many cases reacted by buying start-ups and their technologies.

They are also investing in upgrading their digital infrastructure, with a recent report from Celent, a financial services consulting firm, forecasting European banks would spend more than 60 billion euros ($71 billion) in software and information technology this year.

Banks argue software is a key component of their business, as customers demand more digital products such as mobile payments or online services.

As software becomes more bank-specific, it increases in value and should therefore be incorporated in capital, as is the case for tangible assets like buildings, banks say. This would reduce the amount of cash they have to hold to cover digital expenses under EU rules.

However the European Banking Authority (EBA) said changes to existing rules should be treated with the highest caution.

If banks were free to set aside less capital to cover software expenses, they could end up with a lower capital ratio, which may increase risks.

Banks are also seeking clearer exemptions for digital experts to EU rules which were introduced after the financial crisis to limiting bonuses to 100 percent of bankers salaries.

Banks say this hinders acquisitions of fintech firms, as high-ranking digital staff are used to big bonuses which they may have to relinquish if they become bank employees.

The Commission says the rules already provide exemptions for digital experts, but banks want the EU to clarify them to avoid unintended consequences, Mijs said.

($1 = 0.8407 euros)

Reporting by Francesco Guarascio; editing by Alexander Smith

View original post here:
Fintech pushes EU to explore changes to bank software rules - Reuters

Sept 5 Experiments increasingly rely on high-performance computing software. Differences in software environments can cause problems when those experiments need to be reproduced so scientists at the MDC in Berlin are helping find a solution.

Reproducing experiments and results is a cornerstone of science, but researchers acknowledge that actually achieving this feat can be tricky. Specific experimental setups are usually the result of a labs painstaking work and, in todays environment of high-throughput methods, are increasingly expensive. The fact that complex, customized sets of software are frequently involved in the analysis and interpretation of data makes it even more difficult to achieve true reproducibility.

Guix a free software that is used to fully reproduce computational environments might be part of the solution, says Ludovic Courts of Inria, the French National Institute for computer science and applied mathematics in Bordeaux. To implement it he has joined forces with Ricardo Wurmus of the platform for bioinformatics and modeling at the the MDCs Berlin Institute of Medical Systems Biology (BIMSB), scientists from the Utrecht University Medical Center and a growing group of international colleagues.

Capturing complete computational environments

The National Science Foundation in the US and journals such asNatureare insisting that researchers share source code and support reproducibility. The ability to reproduce an experiment depends among other things on the ability to reproduce the software environment, Courts says. That poses particular difficulties in the many cases which require high-performance computing (HPC) environments.

Guix is an outgrowth of a project called GNU launched almost 40 years ago at MIT in the USA. It makes up for some deficits of earlier efforts and is addressing several challenges: Users are no longer dependent on software package management by system administrators, empowering them to fully customize the environment to their needs. It also solves problems that arise when scientists draw on container solutions, which Courts compares to receiving a brand-new computer where everything has already been installed. That works until you make a small modification in the experiment to test a new hypothesis which often happens in the world of research!

The advantage of Guix is how it characterizes software environments in unambiguous terms, similar to a mathematical function. It completely describes all its relations and thus can reproduce them bit-for-bit. This way, Guix facilitates both reproducibility and customizability.

Adapting Guix to scientists needs

Guix was not originally designed for the high-performance computing environments required by todays experiments. So scientists at the MDC, Inria and the partner institutes are building functions that permit Guix to be used on a computing cluster, to implement reproducible workflows. They are also adding packages that were developed at each site.

Before Guix, the installation of scientific software was necessarily ad-hoc, Wurmus says. Groups would build their own software, statically link it into existing systems, and hope that it would never have to change because managing software environments was virtually impossible. Now not only can we manage a single environment per group in a reliable fashion, but we use Guix at all levels: of the group, user, workflow and so on.

The project is scheduled to last two years, at which time its initiators hope to have met the software reproducibility needs of their institutions. The wider objective, Courts says, is to convince others who rely on high-performance computing that Guix represents a major advance toward a fundamental goal in science.

The Max Delbrck Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC)

The Max Delbrck Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association (MDC) was founded in Berlin in 1992. It is named for the German-American physicist Max Delbrck, who was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. The MDCs mission is to study molecular mechanisms in order to understand the origins of disease and thus be able to diagnose, prevent and fight it better and more effectively. In these efforts, the MDC cooperates with the Charit Universittsmedizin Berlin and the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH) as well as with national partners such as the German Center for Cardiovascular Research and numerous international research institutions. More than 1,600 staff and guests from nearly 60 countries work at the MDC, just under 1,300 of them in scientific research. The MDC is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (90 percent) and the State of Berlin (10 percent), and is a member of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers.http://www.mdc-berlin.de/

Source:Max Delbrck Center for Molecular Medicine

Originally posted here:
Project Adapts Reproducibility Software for HPC Environments - HPCwire (blog)

Reading Black Duck Software's newest paean to the Affero General Public License (AGPL) ("The Quietly Accelerating Adoption of the AGPL"), one could be forgiven for thinking AGPL is rocking the open source licensing planet. After all, Black Duck executive Phil Odence laced his post with fancy charts showing explosive growth of the license, ultimately declaring the AGPL "very popular," and a license his firm sees frequently in audits.

Maybe, maybe not. For all AGPL's supposed popularity, Black Duck can only come up with 8,000 or so projects (among over 60 million open source repositories) that carry the license, with the only reasonably well-known project being MongoDB. That's hardly how I'd characterize "popular."

Meanwhile, permissive licenses like Apache and BSD control virtually any promising project that developers will actually use, from Kubernetes to TensorFlow to Kafka. It's permissive licensing all the way down. Why? Because it's developers that increasingly run the world, and they don't want to get locked out of preferred projects by a license.

It's not surprising that companies would choose the AGPL to control their code. The AGPL is the closest thing possible to a proprietary software license. But...but...but...open source! No, it's free software, as in users are free to use it, and corporations are free to charge money for it (through dual-licensing arrangements), but the AGPL is absolutely not free in any meaningful sense for developers.

SEE:The fall of GPL and the rise of permissive open-source licenses (ZDNet)

This, by the way, is almost certainly the reason that Black Duck is blogging about it. After all, the AGPL must be the open source gift that keeps on giving to a company that makes money by first convincing customers that open source is risky and then selling them the way to de-risk their software. AGPL takes that risk factor to the nth degree ("If GPL3 is scary to private businesses, then AGPL is even scarier," as one recent Black Duck blog post highlights).

AGPL is a way to make one's software radically open, like dropping a nuclear bomb on someone's lap and urging them to keep it.

It's also a way to keep the big clouds of the world from turning one's project into their product. Small wonder, then, that some companies that license their code under the AGPL internally describe it as the "Amazon GPL." AWS, for example, has made orders of magnitude more money from MySQL than MySQL AB (and now Oracle) ever hoped to make (through RDS). By licensing with the AGPL, these companies ensure that no one besides themselves can monetize the project.

The collateral damage in this bargain, however, is developers. Developers want to get stuff done with a minimum of overhead (be it infrastructure or lawyers). In fact, this shift toward permissive licensing has become so pronounced that on GitHub it's still far too common for projects not to have a license at all. The GitHub generation is having to be coaxed into slapping on a license at all. (Redmonk analyst James Governor dubbed this "post open source software.")

SEE: How to get an open-source job (ZDNet)

This is why, by Black Duck's own analysis of over two million open source projects, permissive licenses power over 50% of all open source projects (and even more if we recognize that GPL 2.0 licensing effectively acts like a permissive license in cloud computing contexts):

Black Duck Software

AGPL? It accounts for fewer than 1% of these two million open source projects. And if we add in the other 58 million open source projects....Well, the AGPL's share of those 60 million projects is virtually zero (as in "none").

As such, don't believe Black Duck's AGPL hype. Yes, the license FUD serves the company's sales and marketing operations well, but it doesn't serve developers, or the companies for which they build applications, well at all. Most successful open source projects have a single company or a small group of companies behind them, as a Linux Foundation study uncovered. Fortunately, most of these same companies recognize that developer freedom is the first freedom they need to prioritize. It's why they eschew the AGPL, and you probably should, too.

Image: iStockphoto/polygraphus

Continue reading here:
Don't believe the hype, AGPL open source licensing is toxic and unpopular - TechRepublic (blog)

The Latest on a tech firm agreeing to pay $3.5 million to settle complaints about software it preloaded on laptops (all times local):

6:25 p.m.

A technology company that has agreed to pay $3.5 million and change how it sells laptop computers as part of a settlement reached with federal officials and authorities in New Jersey and 31 other states says it "disagrees with the allegations" contained in complaints about its preloaded software.

Morrisville, North Carolina-based Lenovo said Tuesday it's unaware of any instances of a third party exploiting vulnerabilities in the VisualDiscovery software to gain access to a user's communications.

The VisualDiscovery software was installed on hundreds of thousands of laptops to deliver pop-up ads to consumers.

The Federal Trade Commission says Lenovo "compromised consumers' privacy."

The company notes it stopped preloading VisualDiscovery and worked with antivirus software providers to disable and remove it from consumers' computers after learning of the issues. It says it's pleased to "bring this matter to a close."

___

11:50 a.m.

A technology company will pay $3.5 million and change how it sells laptop computers as part of a settlement reached with federal officials and 32 states, including New Jersey.

The agreement with Lenovo announced Tuesday settles allegations that the North Carolina-based firm sold devices with preloaded software that made users' sensitive personal information vulnerable to hackers.

The VisualDiscovery software was installed on hundreds of thousands of laptops to deliver pop-up ads to consumers.

Lenovo stopped shipping laptops with VisualDiscovery preinstalled in February 2015, but some states contend that some laptops with the software were still being sold by various retail outlets as late as June 2015.

Under the settlement, Lenovo will now obtain consumers' consent to use the software and provide a reasonable way for consumers to opt out, disable or remove it.

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The Latest: Tech firm disagrees with software allegations - Sacramento Bee