Engineering and technology

Francis Poulenc

Jovan Stosic December 7, 2019

Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc (French: [fʁɑ̃sis ʒɑ̃ maʁsɛl pulɛ̃k]; 7 January 1899 – 30 January 1963) was a French composer and pianist. His compositions include songs, solo piano works, chamber music, choral pieces, operas, ballets, and orchestral concert music. Among the best-known are the piano suite Trois mouvements perpétuels (1919), the ballet Les biches (1923), the Concert champêtre (1928) for harpsichord and orchestra, the Organ Concerto (1938), the opera Dialogues des Carmélites (1957), and the Gloria (1959) for soprano, choir and orchestra.

As the only son of a prosperous manufacturer Poulenc was expected to follow his father into the family firm, and he was not allowed to enrol at a music college. Largely self-educated musically, he studied with the pianist Ricardo Viñes, who became his mentor after the composer’s parents died. Poulenc also made the acquaintance of Erik Satie, under whose tutelage he became one of a group of young composers known collectively as Les Six. In his early works Poulenc became known for his high spirits and irreverence. During the 1930s a much more serious side to his nature emerged, particularly in the religious music he composed from 1936 onwards, which he alternated with his more light-hearted works.

In addition to composing, Poulenc was an accomplished pianist. He was particularly celebrated for his performing partnerships with the baritone Pierre Bernac (who also advised him in vocal writing) and the soprano Denise Duval, touring in Europe and America with each, and making many recordings. He was among the first composers to see the importance of the gramophone, and he recorded extensively from 1928 onwards.

In his later years, and for decades after his death, Poulenc had a reputation, particularly in his native country, as a humorous, lightweight composer, and his religious music was often overlooked. During the 21st century more attention has been given to his serious works, with many new productions of Dialogues des Carmélites and La voix humaine worldwide, and numerous live and recorded performances of his songs and choral music.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Poulenc

I7 4790K PCIe Lanes – CPUs, Motherboards, and Memory – Linus Tech Tips

Jovan Stosic November 24, 2019

Hi, I have a I7 4790K and a Gigibyte Z97 Gaming GT with 4 PCI 3.0 x16 slots that are able to run all at the same time in x8 mode.   I’m kind of newbie with PCIe lanes.   How can the CPU with 16 lanes support 32 lanes plus any PCIe x1 slots.   Also, how can if it’s using another chip-set to get additional lanes, how to I check to make sure that my GPUs are using the CPU lanes.

Source: I7 4790K PCIe Lanes – CPUs, Motherboards, and Memory – Linus Tech Tips

DuckDuckGo

Jovan Stosic November 23, 2019

DuckDuckGo (DDG) is an internet search engine that emphasizes protecting searchers’ privacy and avoiding the filter bubble of personalized search results. DuckDuckGo distinguishes itself from other search engines by not profiling its users and by showing all users the same search results for a given search term. It emphasizes returning the best results, rather than the most results, generating those results from over 400 individual sources, including crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, and other search engines like Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex. As of October 2019, it had 47,225,192 daily searches on average.

The company is based in Paoli, Pennsylvania, in Greater Philadelphia, and has 67 employees as of July 2019. The company name is a reference to the children’s game duck, duck, goose.

Some of DuckDuckGo’s source code is free software hosted at GitHub under the Apache 2.0 License, but the core is proprietary. The company registered the domain name ddg.gg on February 22, 2011, and acquired duck.com on December 12, 2018, which are used as shortened URL aliases that redirect to duckduckgo.com.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo

PureOS

Jovan Stosic November 23, 2019

PureOS is a Linux distribution focusing on privacy and security, using the GNOME desktop environment. It is maintained by Purism for use in the company’s Librem laptop computers as well as the Librem 5 smartphone.

PureOS is designed to include only free/libre and open-source software (FOSS/FLOSS), and is included in the list of Free GNU/Linux distributions published by the Free Software Foundation.

PureOS is a Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution, merging open-source software packages from the Debian “testing” main archive using a rolling release model. The default web browser in PureOS is called PureBrowser, a variant of Firefox focusing on privacy. The default search engine in PureBrowser is DuckDuckGo.

The PureOS version released in September 2019 is called PureOS 9.0 Hephaestus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PureOS