OSS Leftovers
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Letter of Recommendation: Bug Fixes
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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The Top 17 Free and Open Source Network Monitoring Tools
Choosing the right network monitoring solution for your enterprise is not easy.
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Hedge-fund managers are overwhelmed by data, and they're turning to an unlikely source: random people on the internet
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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TD Ameritrade Is Taking Its First Steps Towards Major Open Source Contributions
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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The Future of Open Source Big Data Platforms
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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No Easy Way Forward For Commercial Open Source Software Vendors
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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6 Reasons Why Developers Should Contribute More To Open Source
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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WIDE Project, KDDI develop router with open-source software, 3.2T-packet transmission
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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Lack of progress in open source adoption hindering global custody’s digitisation
Custody industry is lagging behind the rest of the financial services sector for open source projects, according to industry experts.
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TNF: Industry should be focusing on open source development
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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Google Open Sources TensorNetwork , A Library For Faster ML And Physics Tasks
“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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Open source to become a ‘best practice’
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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10 Open-Source and Free CAD Software You Can Download Right Now
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.
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