today's leftovers

• Changing Of The Guard For HPC And Big Iron At HPE

  Hewlett Packard Enterprise has been building a mainstream and grassroots server business aimed at large enterprises, HPC centers, and academic and government institutions for two decades. HPE took a run at the hyperscalers and cloud builders and large service providers with its Cloudline minimalist machinery, but has largely backed away from that business because margins are thin to non-existent. The systems business that is left represents the core of HPE after it has largely divested its software and services business, which it spent tens of billions of dollars to acquire to try to create a clone of IBM, and split off its PC and printer business into an entirely different company. While the original Hewlett Packard has a long history in proprietary and Unix systems, it was the acquisition of Compaq way back in September 2001 for $25 billion that gave what is now HPE a volume server business aimed at small, medium, and large enterprises as well as the emerging webscale companies. The rivalry with Dell (and to a lesser extent with Lenovo, Inspur, and Sugon) and the rise of the original design manufacturers who work directly with the hyperscalers and large public cloud builders (Foxconn, Quanta, Inventec, WiWynn, and such) have put the hurt on this ProLiant server business. But that ProLiant business is still formidable, and has many millions of loyal customers.

• SUSE: 7 Digital Transformation Questions IT Should Ask Their Business Managers

  During the journey of digital transformation, organizations have to master several things at the same time: adopting new innovations, increasing efficiency, and maintaining continuity. IT not only plays a crucial role in these improvements but in many cases also leads transformation projects that improve the business.

• Freedom to map depends on WHO delivers it

  At the moment, I do not know enough about this reform and its general background, to have a definite opinion on who is wrong or right here. But that is not important. My only goal with this post is to remind everybody, in India and everywhere else, that “map or you will be mapped” is not just a fancy slogan. Whoever draws the maps, or controls the data needed to draw them, can concretely increase, or limit, your personal freedom and rights. This is the only thing that you surely want to learn from all the congratulations and concerns above. Take them as concrete examples of what could actually go wrong, or right, with mapping laws, whatever digital map you are already living in.

• Microsoft Attacks The Open Web Because It's Jealous Of Google's Success

Programming Leftovers

• Rust Lang team March update

  Did you know that you can see the lang team's active projects on our project board? We're still experimenting and evolving the setup, but the goal is that it should give you a quick overview of what kinds of things the lang team is focused on, and what stage they are in their development. Our minutes contain a writeup for each active project, but let me call out a few highlights here...

• DIY primary/foreign key relationships, again

  In a blog post in 2020 I described a problem I was finding in linked tables. One table had a primary key field and the other had a foreign key field that should have referred back to the first table. That wasn't always the case, because the tables didn't always come from a database with referential integrity. The tables were sometimes built in spreadsheets and the primary and foreign keys were entered by hand. The defective tables usually have formatting differences or orphaned foreign keys. The formatting issue is that the primary key is something like "Abc_def_236-ghi" and the foreign key is "Abc-def-236-ghi"; close, but no cigar. Orphaned foreign keys are correctly formatted entries with no match at all in the primary key set.

• Flutter 2.0 reaches stable and adds support for foldable and dual-screen devices

  For a while now, Flutter for Desktop has been in an alpha stage, which meant changing APIs, bugs, and performance issues. With Flutter 2.0, Google has moved its status to somewhere between beta and stable. What does that mean? Well, it’s available in Flutter 2.0 Stable, but Google doesn’t think it’s fully complete yet. It should be fine for production use, but there may be a bug here and there.

• How I Built a Web Scraper with Beautiful Soup and Used it to Land My First Job

  Landing any job, let alone a first job, can be a difficult process. Employers often tell you that you don't have enough experience for them to hire you. But that means you also won't get an opportunity to gain that experience (like a job). Landing a job in tech can feel even more challenging. On the one hand you have to answer interview questions well, like any other job. On the other you have to prove that your technical skills can do the job you're interviewing for. These hurdles can be difficult to overcome. In this article I'll share how I built a web scraper to help me land my first job in tech. I'll explain what exactly I built and the key lessons I learned. Most importantly, I'll share how I leveraged those lessons to ace my interviews and land a job offer.

• We Sent 304,654 Coding Tests to Developers from 156 Countries – Here’s What We Learned

  At DevSkiller, we are known for our detailed industry reports that assist IT recruitment professionals with their hiring decisions. And this past year has been the most diverse and data-heavy set of information ever compiled by our team. Despite the circumstances that 2020 brought us, the show must go on. We have compiled 304,654 coding tests sent to developers in 156 countries to create the 2021 DevSkiller IT skills report. Whilst it’s easy to point to the big tech multinationals that will indeed profit from a crisis like we’ve had, many other small businesses will have a hard time adapting to the market’s fluctuating demands.

• Qt 6.0.2 Released

  We have released Qt 6.0.2 today. As a patch release, the Qt 6.0.2 does not add any new functionality but provides bug fixes and other improvements.

• The Month in WordPress: February 2021

  That was Josepha Haden Chomphosy on WordPress is Free(dom) episode of the WP Briefing Podcast, speaking about the four freedoms of open-source software. Those four freedoms are core to how WordPress is developed. A lot of the updates we bring you this month will resonate with those freedoms.

• Toolbox your Debian

  Last week I needed a Debian system to test things, I had heard others were using toolbox with Debian images without much trouble so decided to give it a go instead of creating a VM. Toolbox only requires a handful utilities to work with any given docker image. After a quick search I stumbled upon Philippe’s post which in turn linked into this PR about an Ubuntu based toolbox image. Looks like the last major issues where worked out recently in toolbox and there isn’t anything extra needed apart the image.

  

• February GNU Spotlight with Mike Gerwitz: 23 new releases

  23 new GNU releases in the last month (as of February 25, 2021): artanis-0.5 autoconf-archive-2021.02.19 binutils-2.36.1 freeipmi-1.6.7 freeipmi-1.6.8 glibc-2.33 gnuhealth-3.8.0 gwl-0.3.0 help2man-1.48.1 inetutils-2.0 intlfonts-1.4.1 libgcrypt-1.9.2 libredwg-0.12.1 libredwg-0.12.2 linux-libre-5.11 mailutils-3.12 nano-5.6 nettle-3.7.1 octave-6.2.0 parallel-20210222 tar-1.34 unifont-13.0.06 xorriso-1.5.4.pl02

Free Software Leftovers

• Zstd 1.4.9 Released With ~2x Faster Performance For Long Mode

  Zstd previously introduced the "--long" mode to analyze large quantities of data in a timely manner and suitable memory budget. The aim in this mode is to improve the compression ratio for files with long matches at a large distance. With Zstd 1.4.9 the long distance mode is much faster thanks to a number of optimizations that preserve the compression ratio while drastically speeding up the compression time. Test cases are showing this long distance mode being 114~154% faster than the prior point release of Zstd. These new algorithms for the long distance mode appear to be a big win based on all of the data published thus far.

• Conditions and Implied Licenses: Bitmanagement v. United States

  An interesting case was handed down by the Federal Circuit on February 25, 2021, discussing some software licensing issues seldom mentioned in case law. Bitmanagement Software GMBH v. United States was a dispute that involved the use of certain proprietary software, BS Contract Geo, a 3D visualization product. The facts surrounding the license of the software are complex, but laid out in detail in the opinion. The owner of the software, Bitmanagement, and the user of the software, the US Navy, never entered into a direct or express software license. The contracting process, which took place via a reseller called Planet 9, stalled, when it was determined that the Navy’s system needs were incompatible with Bitmanagement’s software management keys. In the end, the Navy paid for some copies, but engaged in “massive free copying” (see concurring opinion, p.27) of the software with no express license to do so. Central to the court’s finding, the parties had agreed that as a condition to the license, the Navy would use Flexera’s license-tracking software FlexWrap to monitor the number of simultaneous users of the software. It noted that the Claims Court found that Bitmanagement agreed to the licensing scheme “because Flexera would limit the number of simultaneous users of BS Contact Geo, regardless of how many copies were installed on Navy computers.” (p. 20) But the Navy did not use the FlexWrap tool as agreed. The court held that use of this management software was a condition of the license, even though the license was not in writing. The court said, “This is one of those rare circumstances where the record as a whole reflects that the only feasible explanation for Bitmanagement allowing mass copying of its software, free of charge, was the use of Flexera at the time of copying.” (p.21)

• Sustainability for Open Source Projects: 4 Big Questions [Ed: VM (Vicky) Brasseur, who promotes proprietary software in some contexts, wants to FUD Free software as having that mythical "sustainability" woe (as if it's all about money). GNU developed for 37 years (soon 38) in spite of that "sustainability" nonsense. People can get paid for things other than their per Free software project.]

  What does sustainability look like for open source projects? VM (Vicky) Brasseur considers four key questions to help determine the answer for your project. These days the word "sustainability" gets thrown around a lot with respect to free and open source software (FOSS). What is sustainability, and what does it mean for your project? The concept of sustainability didn't originate in the 1980s, but it gained a lot of mindshare at that time thanks to the Brundtland Report, which was released by the United Nations in 1987 after three years of research by a cross-functional team of scientists, policy makers, and business people. The report defines sustainability as "…development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

• Samuel Iglesias: Igalia is hiring! [Ed: Case of point; you can get paid to do Free software]

  One of the best decisions I did in my life was when I joined Igalia in 2012. Inside Igalia, I have been working in different open-source projects, most of the time related to graphics technologies, interacting with different communities, giving talks, organizing conferences and, more importantly, contributing to free software as my daily job. [...] What we offer is to work in an open-source consultancy in which you can participate equally in the management and decision-making process of the company via our democratic, consensus-based assembly structure. As all of our positions are remote-friendly, we welcome submissions from any part of the world.