Comment Re: That's terrible! (Score 1) 34
Ha, brilliantly hoisted by my own petard, bravo.
Comment Re: That's terrible! (Score 1) 34
True, but we're not all webdev nerds. I've been working in computing for almost 20 years and wasn't familiar with it. Bias of understanding based on the sector/field you work in is a real thing. Plus it really wouldn't be hard to have TFS start like this:
If you are noticing less traffic to your website's AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)
Perhaps with the definition linking to a Wikipedia page or something. Just helps out those of us who might work in other areas know what the article is talking about.
Comment Re:Meh. (Score 1) 27
Totally agreed when it comes to personal systems. When it comes to enterprise stuff (and this is a story about SLES) having a distributor do the package assembly and vetting for you is immensely valuable. Luckily, at least for SUSE, the historical dependency hell of RPMs is largely gone. I remember having an absolute shit show of a time back in the early Red Hat days with such things but Zypper is pretty sorted in SUSE these days.
Comment Re:Release notes (Score 1) 27
I think you're right, and in fact #1 on IBM Z, Red Hat didn't jump into that space as enthusiastically as SUSE did back in the early 2000s and it still shows.
IBM Takes Airbnb To Court Over Historic Patents (ft.com) 55
IBM is taking Airbnb to court over what it claims is the illegal use of four patents -- the latest in a string of suits against online companies involving historic and arguably broad innovations -- in a move that threatens to cast a shadow over the short-term rental company's road to a proposed IPO. From a report: The computing giant has accused Airbnb of "building its business" by using patents relating to functions such as "presenting advertising in an interactive service" and "improved navigation using bookmarks." "After almost six years of unsuccessful discussions with Airbnb to reach a fair and reasonable patent licence agreement, we had no alternative but to file legal action to protect our intellectual property rights," IBM said. "Airbnb has chosen to ignore our patents and use our technology without compensation."
When Voyager 2 Calls Home, Earth Soon Won't Be Able to Answer (nytimes.com) 59
NASA will spend 11 months upgrading the only piece of its Deep Space Network that can send commands to the prob, which has crossed into interstellar space. From a report: Voyager 2 has been traveling through space for 43 years, and is now 13 billion miles from Earth. But every so often, something goes wrong. At the end of January, for instance, the robotic probe executed a routine somersault to beam scientific data back to Earth when an error triggered a shutdown of some of its functions. "Everybody was extremely worried about recovering the spacecraft," said Suzanne Dodd, who is the Voyager project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The mission's managers on our planet know what to do when such a fault occurs. Although it takes about a day and a half to talk to Voyager 2 at its current distance, they sent commands to restore its normal operations.
But starting on Monday for the next 11 months, they won't be able to get word to the spry spacecraft in case something again goes wrong (although the probe can still stream data back to Earth). Upgrades and repairs are prompting NASA to take offline a key piece of space age equipment used to beam messages all around the solar system. The downtime is necessary because of a flood of new missions to Mars scheduled to leave Earth this summer. But the temporary shutdown also highlights that the Deep Space Network, essential infrastructure relied upon by NASA and other space agencies, is aging and in need of expensive upgrades. On any given day, NASA communicates with an armada of spacecraft in deep space. These long distance calls require the most powerful radio antennas in the world. Luckily NASA has its own switchboard, the Deep Space Network or DSN.
But starting on Monday for the next 11 months, they won't be able to get word to the spry spacecraft in case something again goes wrong (although the probe can still stream data back to Earth). Upgrades and repairs are prompting NASA to take offline a key piece of space age equipment used to beam messages all around the solar system. The downtime is necessary because of a flood of new missions to Mars scheduled to leave Earth this summer. But the temporary shutdown also highlights that the Deep Space Network, essential infrastructure relied upon by NASA and other space agencies, is aging and in need of expensive upgrades. On any given day, NASA communicates with an armada of spacecraft in deep space. These long distance calls require the most powerful radio antennas in the world. Luckily NASA has its own switchboard, the Deep Space Network or DSN.
Submission + - SPAM: The Miseducation Of Lisa Simpson
theodp writes: On Sunday, The Simpsons aired The Miseducation Of Lisa Simpson, an episode in which Marge — with the help of a song from John Legend ("STEM, it's not just for dorks, dweebs and nerds / It'll turn all your dumb kids to Zuckerbergs") — convinces Springfield to use a windfall the town reaped by seizing shipwreck treasure to build the Springfield STEM Academy to 'prepare kids for the jobs of tomorrow.' All goes well initially — both Lisa and Bart love their new school — until Lisa realizes there's a two-tiered curriculum. While children classified as "divergent pathway assimilators" (i.e., gifted) like Lisa study neural networks and C+++ upstairs, kids like Bart are relegated to the basement where they're prepared via VR and gamified learning for a life of menial, gig economy side-hustles — charging e-scooters, shopping for rich people's produce, driving ride-share. Hey, it's not so different from the two-tier caste systems at Google and Facebook, Lisa!
Enjoy Netflix While It Lasts. It Can't Keep Going Like This Forever. (washingtonpost.com) 194
An anonymous reader shares a column: Derek Thompson, writing in the Atlantic last month, highlighted the ways in which contemporary millennial lifestyles are in many ways subsidized by venture capital. Unprofitable businesses are currently offering up great deals to urbanites who otherwise would be unable to afford their fancy city-living in large part because of losses incurred as the cost of buying up market share. "If you wake up on a Casper mattress, work out with a Peloton before breakfast, Uber to your desk at a WeWork, order DoorDash for lunch, take a Lyft home, and get dinner through Postmates, you've interacted with seven companies that will collectively lose nearly $14 billion this year," Thompson wrote of the "Millennial Lifestyle Sponsorship." He doesn't mention it, but there's another key player in the MLS field: Netflix. As Richard Rushfield has noted in his excellent newsletter on Hollywood business, The Ankler, Netflix is in a tricky position. The vast majority of Netflix's viewers (upwards of 80 percent, according to him) watch licensed content ("Friends" and the like) and in order to create a library of programming audiences will pay for, they've gone massively in debt: "Netflix is currently in the hole for about $20 billion in debt and obligations and still operating at a loss."
Those benefiting from the "Netflix and Chill" branch of the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy tree don't care. And it's all well and good for a Silicon Valley unicorn, one of those rare tech beasts whose valuations do not match profit-loss statements because there's no real competition yet and everyone believes first-mover status is an insurmountable advantage. But with the rapid rise of vicious streaming competition -- the ascendancy of Hulu and niche programmers such as Criterion; the creation of streaming services by Disney, Warner Brothers and Apple, to name a (very) few -- Netflix's advantage seems to be fading. One can already sense a sort of nostalgia for the golden age of bingeing while reading the Hollywood Reporter's roundtable with seven studio heads. "Doesn't it bum you out that you can't make 'The Irishman?'" asked THR's Matthew Belloni. And while one might expect studio heads to go the diplomatic route and say no -- everyone in Hollywood believes in their own product, after all, and there are no regrets ahead of time -- you believe the execs when they answer in the negative. "You know, it actually doesn't. It would bum me out if no one made the movie," Universal's Donna Langley said. "It's never been a better time for filmmakers and storytelling and for things to find their way into the world that were getting squeezed over the last five or six years or even longer."
Those benefiting from the "Netflix and Chill" branch of the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy tree don't care. And it's all well and good for a Silicon Valley unicorn, one of those rare tech beasts whose valuations do not match profit-loss statements because there's no real competition yet and everyone believes first-mover status is an insurmountable advantage. But with the rapid rise of vicious streaming competition -- the ascendancy of Hulu and niche programmers such as Criterion; the creation of streaming services by Disney, Warner Brothers and Apple, to name a (very) few -- Netflix's advantage seems to be fading. One can already sense a sort of nostalgia for the golden age of bingeing while reading the Hollywood Reporter's roundtable with seven studio heads. "Doesn't it bum you out that you can't make 'The Irishman?'" asked THR's Matthew Belloni. And while one might expect studio heads to go the diplomatic route and say no -- everyone in Hollywood believes in their own product, after all, and there are no regrets ahead of time -- you believe the execs when they answer in the negative. "You know, it actually doesn't. It would bum me out if no one made the movie," Universal's Donna Langley said. "It's never been a better time for filmmakers and storytelling and for things to find their way into the world that were getting squeezed over the last five or six years or even longer."
Hacking 20 High-Profile Dev Accounts Could Compromise Half of the NPM Ecosystem (zdnet.com) 17
The npm ecosystem of JavaScript libraries is more interwoven than most developers think, and the entire thing is a gigantic house of cards, being one bad hack away from compromising hundreds of thousands of projects, according to a recent academic study. From a report: The research, carried out by the Department of Computer Science from the Technical University of Darmstadt, in Germany, analyzed the dependency graph of the entire npm ecosystem. Researchers downloaded metadata for all the npm packages published until April 2018 and created a giant graph that included 676,539 nodes and 4,543,473 edges (lines connecting the nodes). In addition, academics also analyzed different versions of the same packages, looking at historical versions (5,386,239 versions for the 676,539 packages), but also at the package maintainers (199,327 npm accounts), and known security flaws impacting the packages (609 public reports). [...]
Their goal was to get an idea of how hacking one or more npm maintainer accounts, or how vulnerabilities in one or more packages, reverberated across the npm ecosystem; along with the critical mass needed to cause security incidents inside tens of thousands of npm projects at a time. [...] But while some npm packages load code from too many packages and from too many developers, there is another dangerous trend forming on the npm package repository -- namely the consolidation of popular npm packages under a few maintainer accounts. "391 highly influential maintainers affect more than 10,000 packages, making them prime targets for attacks," the research team said. "If an attacker manages to compromise the account of any of the 391 most influential maintainers, the community will experience a serious security incident."
Their goal was to get an idea of how hacking one or more npm maintainer accounts, or how vulnerabilities in one or more packages, reverberated across the npm ecosystem; along with the critical mass needed to cause security incidents inside tens of thousands of npm projects at a time. [...] But while some npm packages load code from too many packages and from too many developers, there is another dangerous trend forming on the npm package repository -- namely the consolidation of popular npm packages under a few maintainer accounts. "391 highly influential maintainers affect more than 10,000 packages, making them prime targets for attacks," the research team said. "If an attacker manages to compromise the account of any of the 391 most influential maintainers, the community will experience a serious security incident."
Microsoft Wants To Close the UWP, Win32 Divide With 'Windows Apps' (zdnet.com) 78
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: When Microsoft launched UWP in 2015, officials promised that the platform would provide apps with better performance and security because they'd be distributable and updatable from the Microsoft Store. Developers would be able to use a common set of programming interfaces across Windows 10, Windows Phone, HoloLens and more, officials said, when selling the UWP vision. The downside: UWP apps would work on Windows 10-based devices only. Developers would have to do work to get their apps to be UWP/Store-ready. And Win32 apps wouldn't get UWP features like touch and inking. Arguably, [Kevin Gallo, Corporate Vice President of the Windows Developer Platform] told me, "we shouldn't have gone that way," meaning creating this schism. But Microsoft execs -- including Gallo -- continue to maintain that UWP is not dead. Over the past year or so, Microsoft has been trying to undo some of the effects of what Gallo called the "massive divide" between Win32 and UWP by adding "modern desktop" elements to Win32 apps.
"By the time we are done, everything will just be called 'Windows apps,'" Gallo told me. "We're not quite there yet." But the ultimate idea is to make "every platform feature available to every developer." In short, Microsoft's new goal is to try to make all features available to all of the Windows frameworks. Saying that Microsoft is dropping or deprecating any of the Windows frameworks seems to have been declared from on-high as a big no-no. Instead, Win32, UWP, Windows Presentation Foundation are all "elevated to full status," as Gallo told me. What about the Microsoft Store? Gallo says it's not dead. In Gallo's view, "the Store is about commerce. It's another channel for distribution." But it's not the only way Windows users will be able to get apps. "You can trust apps differently. They don't need to be in the Store. People really just want to know if Microsoft considers an app good," he said.
ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley says "it sounds like Microsoft may be moving toward a model of getting apps Microsoft-certified and trusted and then allowing Windows developers to decide how best to distribute them -- via the Microsoft Store, the Web or other methods of their choosing."
"By the time we are done, everything will just be called 'Windows apps,'" Gallo told me. "We're not quite there yet." But the ultimate idea is to make "every platform feature available to every developer." In short, Microsoft's new goal is to try to make all features available to all of the Windows frameworks. Saying that Microsoft is dropping or deprecating any of the Windows frameworks seems to have been declared from on-high as a big no-no. Instead, Win32, UWP, Windows Presentation Foundation are all "elevated to full status," as Gallo told me. What about the Microsoft Store? Gallo says it's not dead. In Gallo's view, "the Store is about commerce. It's another channel for distribution." But it's not the only way Windows users will be able to get apps. "You can trust apps differently. They don't need to be in the Store. People really just want to know if Microsoft considers an app good," he said.
ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley says "it sounds like Microsoft may be moving toward a model of getting apps Microsoft-certified and trusted and then allowing Windows developers to decide how best to distribute them -- via the Microsoft Store, the Web or other methods of their choosing."
Comment Re:News for nerds... (Score 1) 167
Cruise ships are a form of technology and an interesting one. There are medical and biology nerds who might be interested in this story as well.
Comment Re:Damn. (Score 1) 398
While I understand this suspicion and it may be true, IBM has a track record of contributing code back to the mainline kernel after investing substantial amounts of money in that development. It's true that I'm referring to them contributing money for development specifically for platforms they own (Z and P systems) but I hope they follow a similar model now that they have an ownership stake in the biggest x86 server side distro. I don't really see how they could say "no more derivatives" given that much of what Red Hat has done is likely derivative of GPLd projects itself. Frankly, if they take systemd and tie it up in a proprietary license I'll be happy since it'll turn it into the MiniDisk/BetaMax of init systems!
Comment Re:Damn. (Score 1) 398
I concur. I work on both z/OS and z/VM and have never felt any pressure to get any kind of certification. Quite the opposite in fact, they have provided me with no-strings, gratis education so I can work on the products more efficiently. IBM isn't perfect but this particular problem is very much made of straw.
Comment Re:Most prevalent? No. (Score 1) 335
Mainframe (z/OS or zTPF) centric applications like CICS and WAS have native SOAP/REST interfaces now, so while it may be true that interfaces are being written because they need to understand how to actually address the data that is stored in these systems, developers are able to do so with modern APIs for the most part. Now as for the backends themselves, i.e. the programs that facilitate the business logic, that's what the COBOL and in some cases Assembler programmers are needed for!
Comment Re:Most prevalent? No. (Score 5, Informative) 335
It really isn't a stupid anecdote. Go to SHARE or GSE in Europe, you'll see representatives from the largest financial, retail and governmental industries who represent the bulk of transactional computing in the world. Practically every debit/credit/charge card swipe goes through a COBOL program, and these aren't "legacy" systems that are simply being maintained but systems in active development. I know personally of programs that have been written to facilitate new features like various NFC payment technologies recently. I will grant you that it's a largely invisible sector of the IT industry, if I wasn't in it I would probably still be ignorant to it too.
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Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
