Today in Techrights
| today's leftovers
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This was a long-time request, and something that I myself was missing when using To Do. Since it fits well with the product vision of the app, there was nothing preventing it from being implemented.
Selecting this feature to be implemented during the week was a great choice – the task was self contained, had a clear end, and was just difficult just enough to be challenging but not more than that.
However, I found a few issues with the implementation, and want to use the next round to polish the feature. Using the entire week to polish the feature might be too much, but it will give me some time to really make it great.
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During the OpenSUSE Conference in Nurnberg (German), Nextcloud founder Frank Karlitschek appeared on “Let’s Talk’ to talk about the importance of fully open source file sync and storage solutions for enterprise customers. As one of the early contributors to desktop Linux he also talked about the reasons why desktop Linux has not succeeded.
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Some maintainers for critical software operate from a niche at a university or a government agency that supports their effort. There might be a few who are independently wealthy.
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So, so tired of the "hot take" that having a single browser engine implementation is good, and there is no value to having multiple implementations of a standard. I have a little story to tell about this.
In the late 90s, I worked for a company called Vectiv. There isn't much info on the web (the name has been used by other companies in the meantime), this old press release is one of the few I can find.
Vectiv was a web-based service for commercial real estate departments doing site selection. This was pretty revolutionary at the time, as the state-of-the-art for most of these was to buy a bunch of paper maps and put them up on the walls, using push-pins to keep track of current and possible store locations.
The story of Vectiv is interesting on its own, but the relevant bit to this story is that it was written for and tested exclusively in IE 5.5 for Windows, as was the style at the time. The once-dominant Netscape browser had plummeted to negligible market share, and was struggling to rewrite Netscape 6 to be based on the open-source Mozilla Suite.
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OSS Leftovers
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I wouldn’t expect a nonprogrammer to understand the above, but you can intuit some of what’s going on: that we don’t need ImageMagick to scale images anymore, because the text editor can scale images on its own; that it’s bad form to spell-check hex values, which specify colors; that the bell is doing something peculiar if someone holds down the alt key; and so forth.
But there’s also something larger, more gladdening, about reading bug fixes.
My text editor, Emacs, is a free software project with a history going back more than 40 years; the codebase itself starts in the 1980s, and as I write this there are 136,586 different commits that get you from then to now. More than 600 contributors have worked on it. I find those numbers magical: A huge, complex system that edits all kinds of files started from nothing and then, with nearly 140,000 documented human actions, arrived at its current state. It has leaders but no owner, and it will move along the path in which people take it. It’s the ship of Theseus in code form. I’ve probably used Emacs every day for more than two decades. It has changed me, too. It will outlive me.
Open source is a movement, and even the charitably inclined would call it an extreme brofest. So there’s drama. People fight it out in comments, over everything from semicolons to codes of conduct. But in the end, the software works or it doesn’t. Politics, our personal health, our careers or lives in general — these do not provide a narrative of unalloyed progress. But software, dammit, can and does. It’s a pleasure to watch the code change and improve, and it’s also fascinating to see big companies, paid programmers and volunteers learning to work together (the Defense Department is way into open source) to make those changes and improvements. I read the change logs, and I think: Humans can do things.
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Choosing the right network monitoring solution for your enterprise is not easy.
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Alternative data streams of satellite images and cellphone-location data are where managers are now digging for alpha, as new datasets are created every day. And hedge funds have been spending serious cash searching for those who can take all this information and quickly find the important pieces.
Now, as margins shrink and returns are under the microscope, hedge funds are beginning to consider a cheaper, potentially more efficient way to crunch all this data: open-source platforms, where hundreds of thousands of people ranging from finance professionals to students, scientists, and developers worldwide scour datasets — and don't get paid unless they find something that a fund finds useful.
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STUMPY is a python library to identify the patterns and anomalies in time series data. STUMPY has benefited from open source as a means to shorten development roadmaps since the early 2000s and it represents a new opportunity for TD Ameritrade to give back to the developer community.
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Three well-funded startups – Cloudera Inc., Hortonworks Inc., and MapR Technologies Inc. — emerged a decade ago to commercialize products and services in the open-source ecosystem around Hadoop, a popular software framework for processing huge amounts of data. The hype peaked in early 2014 when Cloudera raised a massive $900 million funding round, valuing it at $4.1 billion.
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While still a student in 1995, Kimball developed the first version of GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) as a class project, along with Peter Mattis. Later on as a Google engineer, he worked on a new version of the Google File System, and the Google Servlet Engine. In 2012, Kimball, Mattis, and Brian McGinnis launched the company Viewfinder, later selling it to Square.
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Even by fixing minor things like a bug in a library or writing a piece of documentation can also help the developers to write readable or maintainable code. They can independently suggest to the community and generally tend to stick by the rules of writing a code that is easy to understand. The fact that the code will be exposed to everyone naturally makes them write focus on making it readable.
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The WIDE Project has adopted a router developed by Japanese operator KDDI. The router runs open-source software, and will be used with the networks operated and managed by the WIDE Project. The router will use open-source software with up to 3.2T-packet transmission.
For this project, KDDI plans to start tests this month to verify the practical utility and interoperability of these routers when put to use in the actual service environment. The WIDE Project will be in charge of network administration and definition of requirements for router implementation.
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Custody industry is lagging behind the rest of the financial services sector for open source projects, according to industry experts.
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According to O'Shea, open source and the community are helping firms to find and attract experienced technology talent “uber engineers”.
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“Every evolving intelligence will eventually encounter certain very special ideas – e.g., about arithmetic, causal reasoning and economics–because these particular ideas are very much simpler than other ideas with similar uses,” said the AI maverick Marvin Minsky four decades ago.
Mathematics as a tool to interpret nature’s most confounding problems from molecular biology to quantum mechanics has so far been successful. Though there aren’t any complete answers to these problems, the techniques within domain help throw some light on the obscure corners of reality.
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There are many magic rings in this world… and none of them should be used lightly. This is true.
It is also true that organisations in every vertical are now having to work hard and find automation streams that they can digitise (on the road to *yawn* digital transformation, obviously) and start to apply AI and machine learning to.
Another key truth lies in the amount of codified best practices that organisations now have the opportunity to lay down.
One we can denote a particular set of workflows in a particular department (or team, or group, or any other collective) to be deemed to be as efficient as possible, then we can lay that process down as a best practice.
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Many CAD software products exist today for anyone interested in 2D or 3D designing.
From browser tools to open-source programs, the market is full of free options available for hobbyists or small companies just starting out.
| How to Send Emails From Linux Terminal
A brief introduction to SSMTP, steps to install it and use the same to send emails from Linux terminal.
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