Month: April 2021

Enlarge / Funeral pyres of people who died of COVID-19 being prepared simultaneously at Gazipur crematorium on April 26, 2021 in New Delhi, India. (credit: Getty | Raj K Raj)

India’s skyrocketing surge of COVID-19 cases has launched the country into the most harrowing crisis yet in the pandemic.

While international aid pours into the country, many have called for the US to donate millions of doses from its stockpile of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine to India, which has vaccinated less than 2 percent of its population and is running out of doses.

AstraZeneca’s vaccine is widely used around the world, including in India, but it is not yet authorized for use in the US. Even if it does earn authorization here, Biden administration officials say it’s unlikely that the US will need the vaccine, given the healthy quantity of supplies of the three COVID-19 vaccines already authorized in the country made by Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech, and Johnson & Johnson.

Enlarge / Funeral pyres of people who died of COVID-19 being prepared simultaneously at Gazipur crematorium on April 26, 2021 in New Delhi, India. (credit: Getty | Raj K Raj)

India’s skyrocketing surge of COVID-19 cases has launched the country into the most harrowing crisis yet in the pandemic.

While international aid pours into the country, many have called for the US to donate millions of doses from its stockpile of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine to India, which has vaccinated less than 2 percent of its population and is running out of doses.

AstraZeneca’s vaccine is widely used around the world, including in India, but it is not yet authorized for use in the US. Even if it does earn authorization here, Biden administration officials say it’s unlikely that the US will need the vaccine, given the healthy quantity of supplies of the three COVID-19 vaccines already authorized in the country made by Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech, and Johnson & Johnson.

• 

  We installed a copy of AlmaLinux this morning—it installed quickly and easily in a process very similar to Fedora's. [credit: Jim Salter ]

Today, CloudLinux Inc announced that it will offer commercial support for the AlmaLinux community distribution. The new support plans will be available next week and will include regular patches and updates for AlmaLinux's kernel and core packages, patch delivery SLAs, and 24/7 incident support.

What’s AlmaLinux?

AlmaLinux is one of several Linux distributions jostling for position as "the new CentOS" in the wake of Red Hat's December 2020 deprecation of its own free-as-in-beer Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone distribution.

AlmaLinux was initially sponsored by CloudLinux Inc. and is based on its own CloudLinux commercial distribution—but the company specifically set up the new distribution to be community owned and governed. Its qualifications as "the new CentOS" come from its base on the source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

• 

  The new Amazon Fire HD 10 tablet. It has slimmer bezels and a new front camera placement. [credit: Amazon ]

Amazon has introduced the 11th-generation version of the Fire 10 HD tablet. This year's edition adds wireless charging for the "Plus" model, a new front camera location (now positioned for landscape video chats instead of portrait), and slimmer side bezels, leading to a more symmetrical design.

Detailed specs are on Amazon's developer site. The tablet features a 2 GHz MediaTek MT8183 SoC, the same chip used in the 10th- and 9th-gen Fire tablets going back to 2019. This is an eight-core, 12 nm chip with four Cortex A73 cores and four A53 cores. The GPU is an ARM Mali-G72 MP3. Other specs include a 10.1-inch, 1920×1200 LCD; 3GB of RAM; 32GB or 64GB of storage; a USB-C port; Wi-Fi up to 802.11ac; a headphone jack; a microSD slot; and stereo speakers. Amazon says the battery is good for "12 hours," which previously has indicated a 6300 mAh battery.

True to its form as an online retail giant, Amazon's Fire 10 HD is available in a bunch of different versions and bundles: