Programming and Software Patents
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Oracle Java 17 delivers thousands of performance and security updates
Oracle released Java 17, the latest version of the world’s number one programming language and development platform. Java 17 delivers thousands of performance, stability, and security updates, as well as 14 JEPs (JDK Enhancement Proposals) that further improve the Java language and platform to help developers be more productive.
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A Rant on Personal Software Projects
In contrast, a product personal project focuses on what it does and the experience as an end-user interacts with it. Maybe it has a great README, a slick user experience, or does something better than anything else out there. The point is that it is focused on the end-user that uses it rather than the person who makes it. It doesn’t particularly matter what it looks like on the inside. It could be based on COBOL and be a tangle of spaghetti internally. Clean code helps with maintenance and project longevity, but it does absolutely nothing for the product experience.
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Paul E. Mc Kenney: Stupid RCU Tricks: Making Race Conditions More Probable
Given that it is much more comfortable chasing down race conditions reported by rcutorture than those reported from the field, it would be good to make race conditions more probable during rcutorture runs than in production. A number of tricks are used to make this happen, including making rare events (such as CPU-hotplug operations) happen more frequently, testing the in-kernel RCU API directly from within the kernel, and so on.
Another approach is to change timing. Back at Sequent in the 1990s, one way that this was accomplished was by plugging different-speed CPUs into the same system and then testing on that system. It was observed that for certain types of race conditions, the probability of the race occurring increased by the ratio of the CPU speeds. One such race condition is when a timed event on the slow CPU races with a workload-driven event on the fast CPU. If the fast CPU is (say) two times faster than the slow CPU, then the timed event will provide two times greater “collision cross section” than if the same workload was running on CPUs running at the same speed.
Given that modern CPUs can easily adjust their core clock rates at runtime, it is tempting to try this same trick on present-day systems. Unfortunately, everything and its dog is adjusting CPU clock rates for various purposes, plus a number of modern CPUs are quite happy to let you set their core clock rates to a value sufficient to result in physical damage. Throwing rcutorture into this fray might be entertaining, but it is unlikely to be all that productive.
Another approach is available on multi-socket systems, namely, making use of memory latency. The idea is for the rcutorture scripting to place one pair of a given scenario's vCPUs in the hyperthreads of a single core within one socket and to place another pair of that same scenario's vCPUs in the hyperthreads of a single core of the other socket. The theory is that the different communications latencies and bandwidths within a core on the one hand and between sockets on the other should have roughly the same effect as does varying CPU core clock rates.
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Square joins the Open Invention Network | ZDNet
The OIN, the world's largest patent non-aggression consortium, protects Linux and related open-source software and the companies behind them from patent attacks and patent trolls. The OIN recently broadened its scope from core Linux programs and adjacent open-source code by expanding its Linux System Definition to other patents such as the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and the Extended File Allocation Table (exFAT) file system.
That may not sound to you like a natural fit for a retail financial services and digital payments company which is best known for its ubiquitous Square Reader for smartcards, but actually, it is. Behind it is a foundation of open-source software.
As Bob Lee, Square's former CTO, once said, "Open source is part of our DNA. As a member of the open-source community -- and a company that's benefited from many open source libraries -- we have a responsibility to pay it forward. We always have the mindset to open-source our code when we build."
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