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Oracle has started to dispatch Java audit letters to Fortune 200 companies for the first time, according to one licensing expert.

But industry experts have pointed out that businesses with limited Java use would have to license the software per employee under the latest model, a dramatic shift from the one previously offered by Oracle.

But that has changed in recent months, according to Craig Guarente, founder and CEO of Palisade Compliance, an independent Oracle licensing advisory company.

Guarente was speaking on a webinar hosted by Azul, which helps organizations move away from Oracle Java to open source alternatives.

In February 2023, Gartner warned that Oracle “actively targets organizations” on Java compliance following the introduction of new contractual terms for the code.

In July last year, The Register revealed Oracle was sending unsolicited emails to businesses offering to discuss Java subscription deals, seemingly in an effort to extract information that could be to its benefit in future license negotiations.

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Even though the research commissioned by consultancy Engprax could be seen as a thinly veiled plug for Impact Engineering methodology, it feeds into the suspicion that the Agile Manifesto might not be all it’s cracked up to be.

One standout statistic was that projects with clear requirements documented before development started were 97 percent more likely to succeed.

“Our research has shown that what matters when it comes to delivering high-quality software on time and within budget is a robust requirements engineering process and having the psychological safety to discuss and solve problems when they emerge, whilst taking steps to prevent developer burnout.”

A neverending stream of patches indicates that quality might not be what it once was, and code turning up in an unfinished or ill-considered state have all been attributed to Agile practices.

One Agile developer criticized the daily stand-up element, describing it to The Register as “a feast of regurgitation.”

In highlighting the need to understand the requirements before development begins, the research charts a path between Agile purists and Waterfall advocates.

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Exclusive Red Hat is slowing or stopping development of some of its middleware software, a situation which could result in some staff layoffs.

The Register has seen what purports to be an internal email from the IBM subsidiary’s vice president of Middleware Engineering, Mark Little, revealing that development and maintenance of several of the company’s products will be slowed, stopped, or – using one of everyone’s favorite bits of corporate euphemism – “rightsized.”

Apparently the changes are part of the company’s “strategic realignment,” which is assessing the Hat’s products and services “to identify those that no longer aligned with our long-term strategy.”

The biggest batch of projects are those to be “rightsized,” which means the company will “reduce the number of associates working on the product to align to current business needs.”

Products on which fewer Hatters will be working include the following half dozen of Red Hat’s own builds of existing projects:

The Reg FOSS desk hopes that perhaps some of his former colleagues in Big Purple’s Java teams are able to find new roles associated with the now far more cool and trendy AI instead – either inside the company, or outside it.

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Rustls is the modern TLS library written in the Rust programming language with a large emphasis on memory safety and security.

Via a new “rustls-openssl-compat” OpenSSL compatibility layer started by the Rustls project, this Rust TLS implementation can now work with the Nginx web server.

This layer has been successfully tested with recent versions of Nginx to allow switching from OpenSSL to the memory-safe Rustls by simply swapping out the library.

The announcement this week notes: "After investing heavily in Rustls over the last few years, we now see it as a viable, performant, and memory safe alternative to OpenSSL.

Recent releases have brought pluggable cryptography with FIPS support, performance optimizations, post-quantum key exchange, and numerous other improvements.

In the coming months, we will focus on improving performance in the few areas where Rustls doesn’t already surpass OpenSSL and add support for RFC 8879 for certificate compression.

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Ahead of Google’s annual I/O developer conference in May, the tech giant has laid off staff across key teams like Flutter, Dart, Python and others, according to reports from affected employees shared on social media.

“As we’ve said, we’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” said Google spokesperson Alex García-Kummert.

“To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023 and into 2024, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers, and align their resources to their biggest product priorities.

Through this, we’re simplifying our structures to give employees more opportunity to work on our most innovative and important advances and our biggest company priorities, while reducing bureaucracy and layers,” he added.

Meanwhile, others shared on Y Combinator’s Hacker News, where a Python team member detailed their specific duties on the technical front and noted that, for years, much of the work was done with fewer than 10 people.

WARN, or the California Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, requires employers with more than 100 employees to provide 60-day notice in advance of layoffs.

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Merged yesterday to the Git code for the PostgreSQL database server is support for facilitating incremental backups.

Robert Haas a few months ago restarted work to implement incremental backup support for PostgreSQL, years after he originally pursued the feature to no avail at that time.

But this time around things panned out and merged to PostgreSQL is support for producing incremental backups.

Haas explained in his proposal from June: The basic design of this patch set is pretty simple, and there are three main parts.

Naturally, we don’t find out about blocks that were modified without any write-ahead log record, e.g. hint bit updates, but those are of necessity not critical for correctness, so it’s OK. Second, pg_basebackup has a mode where it can take an incremental backup.

The PostgreSQL 17 database server stable debut is tentatively planned for next September so it will be interesting to see what other exciting changes make it for this next version.

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There wasn’t direct conflict or battle, but there were scarce resources, and the savviest player could corner the market for them.

While it is “rooted in classic Catan mechanics of trading, harvesting, and building,” there are some decidedly 2024 issues at play now that the Vikings have settled in for more than a millennia.

“Very often at the end of the game, you see everybody completely freaking out, like, ‘Oh man, we’ve got to save the world!’” Benjamin Teuber told Fast Company.

If you haven’t played a Catan game in a while or missed most of the variants and alternate settings, New Energies might provide a distinctly fresh experience.

And the new systems look like they’ll provide some new layers of strategy for those who might feel too familiar with the core Catan concepts.

At a minimum, you can test your friends’ patience and sense of humor by playing as a game-ending cheap coal villain.

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The Linux Foundation last week announced that it will host Valkey, a fork of the Redis in-memory data store.

This fork originated at AWS, where longtime Redis maintainer Madelyn Olson initially started the project in her own GitHub account.

Olson told me that when the news broke, a lot of the current Redis maintainers quickly decided that it was time to move on.

“When the news broke, everyone was just like, ‘Well, we’re not going to go contribute to this new license,’ and so as soon as I talked to everyone, ‘Hey, I have this fork — we’re trying to keep the old group together,'” she said, “pretty much everyone was like, ‘yeah, I’m immediately on board.”

Redis’s announcement came right in the middle of the European version of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s KubeCon conference, which was held in Paris this year.

One area Redis (the company) is investing in is moving beyond in-memory to also using flash storage, with RAM as a large, high-performance cache.

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They were likely very close to seeing the backdoor update merged into Debian and Red Hat, the two biggest distributions of Linux, when an eagle-eyed software developer spotted something fishy.

Andres Freund, a developer and engineer working on Microsoft’s PostgreSQL offerings, was recently troubleshooting performance problems a Debian system was experiencing with SSH, the most widely used protocol for remotely logging in to devices over the Internet.

Through a combination of sheer luck and Freund’s careful eye, he eventually discovered the problems were the result of updates that had been made to xz Utils.

On Friday, Freund took to the Open Source Security List to disclose the updates were the result of someone intentionally planting a backdoor in the compression software.

Malicious code added to xz Utils versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 modified the way the software functions when performing operations related to lzma compression or decompression.

For instance, Tan replaced Collins’ contact information with their own on oss-fuzz, a project that scans open source software for vulnerabilities that can be exploited.

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It is 40 years since Turbo Pascal revolutionized the coding marketplace with a slick (for the time) Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and performance to spare.

Turbo Pascal was released in 1983 and represented a shift from the traditional way programming tools worked in the early days of IBM PC compatibles.

Anders Hejlsberg, who would later go on to join Microsoft as part of the C# project, is widely credited as creator of the language, with Borland boss Philippe Kahn identifying the need for the all-in-one tool.

Object-oriented programming features turned up, including classes and inheritance, and a step-by-step debugger.

However, the steamroller of tools such as Visual Basic 3 ensured that Borland never had the same success in Windows that it enjoyed under DOS.

The language might have offended Pascal purists and the IDE seems a little clunky nowadays when compared to modern tools.

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“You are charging attendees money and they might be making their purchasing decision based on the list of speakers shown to them on the conference website,” wrote former Google developer advocate Kelsey Hightower in a post on the social media platform X confirming that he can no longer participate.

The controversy arose after Gergely Orosz, the author of a popular tech newsletter called Pragmatic Engineering, first posted the allegations on X on Friday.

“To spell it out why this conference generated fake women speakers,” Orosz alleges, it was "because the organizer wants big names and it probably seemed like an easy way to address their diversity concerns.

Howard—Amazon Web Services’ head of developer relations and the only woman still scheduled to speak at DevTernity—told Ars that the situation is “baffling,” confirming that she has not heard from Sizovs since he emailed her to verify that the event was cancelled.

Sizovs claimed that Boyko, “a demo persona from our test website version,” was added to DevTernity’s speaker list “by mistake” after two real women cancelled their conference appearances due to “reasons out of our control at the worst possible time.”

But perhaps most striking is the fact that an administrator told 404 Media that both Sizovs’ and Kirsina’s accounts were banned “multiple times” by the Lobst.ers coding forum for “sockpuppeting”—using a false identity to deceive others—in 2019 and 2020.

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At certain data volumes and distances, the pigeon is a quicker option for large swaths of rural America, where internet speeds can lag far behind the national average.

Rural-urban and rich-poor divides in internet quality persist because of uneven investment, according to Alex Kelley, head of broadband consulting at the Center on Rural Innovation.

The daily inefficiencies that come with slower internet can add up to lagging economic growth or increased unemployment as reliance on the digital economy grows, Kelley says.

Earlier this year, YouTuber and software developer Jeff Geerling strapped 3 terabytes’ worth of flash drives onto a pigeon.

(He made sure to wrap them in a plastic bag: “If the bird poops, you don’t want to lose your data.”) The pigeon won against his super-fast gigabit fiber internet.

In 2016, Amazon launched AWS Snowmobile, a shipping container that can hold up to 100 petabytes of data — that’s 20 billion iPhone photos.

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Slint as a reminder is a Rust-written open-source graphical toolkit that on Linux uses Qt currently underneath.

Slint 1.3 is their first release with an initial Android port to be able to begin crafting Rust-based UIs for mobile and embedded environments.

The NLNet Foundation funded work on this Android port.

Slint 1.3 also adds native style support for Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS while Slint on Linux continues making use of Qt when available.

With the Slint 1.3 announcement they showcased WesAudio as one of the apps making use of this toolkit:

Downloads and more details on the Slint 1.3 Rust UI toolkit via Slint.dev and the repository on GitHub.

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Removed by mod

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Merged to LLVM 18 Git yesterday was the initial support for the OpenMP kernel language, an effort around having performance portable GPU codes as an alternative to the likes of the proprietary CUDA.

This work is a set of extensions to LLVM OpenMP coming out of researchers at Stony Brook University and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

We ported six established CUDA proxy and benchmark applications and evaluated their performance on both AMD and NVIDIA platforms.

By comparing with native versions (HIP and CUDA), our results show that OpenMP, augmented with our extensions, can not only match but also in some cases exceed the performance of kernel languages, thereby offering performance portability with minimal effort from application developers."

Ultimately the hope is these extensions will ease the transition from kernel languages like CUDA to OpenMP in a portable and cross-vendor manner.

As outlined in the aforelinked research paper, the early proof-of-concept performance results have been very promising compared to NVIDIA CUDA and AMD HIP.

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PARIS, Sept 20 (Reuters) - Unions at the Apple (AAPL.O) France stores have called for a strike on Friday and Saturday ahead of the iPhone 15 launch, demanding better pay and working conditions.

“Management having decided to ignore our perfectly legitimate demands and concerns, the four unions of Apple Retail France …call for a strike on Sept. 22 and 23,” CGT Apple Retail said in a union front statement on social media platform X, formerly Twitter, on Wednesday.

The unions also called for workers to demonstrate on Friday morning at the Paris Opera Garnier, which is next to one of Apple’s flagship stores in Paris.

Apple France could not immediately be reached for comment.

Last week, Apple was rocked by a French government decision to suspend sales of iPhone 12 handsets after tests which it said found breaches of radiation exposure limits.

On Friday, Apple pledged to update software on iPhone 12s in France to settle the dispute over radiation levels, but concerns in other European countries signalled it may have to take similar action elsewhere.

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“Catan: The Official Cookbook ” includes 77 recipes inspired by the multiplayer phenomenon, dishes like Forest Dweller’s Dip, Tavern Ale Pie and Fireside Banana Boats.

It’s not just a gimmick or a gag gift by any means,” says Casie Vogel, vice president of editorial at Ulysses Press.

The recipes pay homage to the game, in which competitors try to build settlements on a fictional island using five resources: wool, grain, lumber, brick and ore.

You can whip up a batch of Manchego cheese crackers for friends as you play, or cater a bigger dinner party with the Great Hall Rack of Lamb.

Vogel — along with a recipe creator and a tester — came up with the dishes with the blessing of the game maker, and she calls the process “collaborative.” She started work in fall 2021.

The cookbook, which comes out the same month as the Catan U.S. national championships in Minnesota, reflects an aspect of the game that players enjoy — it prizes cooperation over annihilation.

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The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Wednesday that Beijing had ordered central government agency officials to not bring iPhones into the office or use them for work.

Last week, during US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo’s visit to Beijing, Chinese tech giant Huawei unexpectedly unveiled its Mate 60 Pro smartphone.

Canada-based technology research firm, TechInsights, said the phone contained a new 5G Kirin 9000s processor, developed for Huawei by China’s largest contract chipmaker SMIC.

This week, US congressman Mike Gallagher, who is the chairman of the House of Representatives committee on China, called on the Commerce Department to further restrict exports to Huawei and SMIC.

Meanwhile, on Thursday Apple released an emergency software update for a vast number of old and current devices after a security vulnerability was discovered being used by unknown hackers.

The update was released after digital rights investigators at Citizen Lab discovered attackers hacking Apple devices of specific targets using a novel and unheard of technique.

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Industry group Airlines UK argues that carriers incurred huge costs in providing accommodation and putting on more flights for customers who were stuck overseas.

He said that “there won’t be any issues” for customers claiming costs, but demanded that Nats, which controls the UK’s air traffic services, “accepts responsibility for its incompetence”.

In its initial report published on Wednesday, Nats said that at 08:32 on 28 August, its system received details of a flight which was due to cross UK airspace later that day.

With planes and crew out of position and most flights already booked up, many people found themselves stuck abroad on what is usually a big day for travel - a bank holiday - facing long waits to get home.

He added that the independent review from the aviation watchdog will “dig deeper into this event and understand whether there are any further steps to be taken to improve the resilience of the air traffic control system”.

If you are reading this page and can’t see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk.

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The Silicon Valley elites who have been quietly buying up northern California farmland for several years have gone public with their vision for the utopian city they hope to build from scratch on 55,000 acres in Solano county.

This week the group behind the effort, Flannery Associates, launched a website for the initiative and released a series of sunny renderings showing Mediterranean-style homes and walkable and bikeable neighborhoods.

Last week, the New York Times revealed that Flannery Associates was backed by a group of prominent Silicon Valley investors and aimed to build a new city, operated using clean energy, that would create thousands of jobs while offering residents reliable public transportation and urban living.

The group of backers includes Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder; venture capitalist Michael Moritz; Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder of the philanthropic group Emerson Collective and wife of the late Steve Jobs; Marc Andreessen, the investor and software developer; Patrick and John Collison, the sibling co-founders of the payment processor Stripe; and the entrepreneurs Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, the Times reported.

“People in my district are understandably alarmed at a shadowy investment group buying up large tracts of farmland, purportedly to build a new city,” Bill Dodd, a state senator, said in a statement.

“We are grateful to our elected officials for allowing us the chance to discuss our vision to deliver good-paying jobs, affordable housing, walkable communities, clean energy, sustainable infrastructure, open space, and a healthy environment,” said Brian Brokaw on behalf of California Forever.

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