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Showing posts from March, 2021

Melissa to showcase Unison Data Quality Management Platform

Online session will highlight the role of customizable, browser-based data quality management in easing path to data governance RANCHO SANTA MARGARITA, Calif., March 31, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) —  Melissa , a leading provider of global data quality and address management solutions, today announced a free webinar designed to offer IT and business stakeholders insight on the role of simple, easy-to-use customer data management. Featuring Unison, Melissa’s flagship data quality platform, the webinar will demonstrate intuitive data quality management through a centralized portal, browser-based and customizable to user needs with no coding required. Offered as part of Dataversity’s Demo Day event series, the Unison session is slated for April 14, from 1:00-2:00 p.m. Eastern and users can register  here . Resolving bad, dirty, or duplicate data is a costly and time-consuming process, especially when dealing with many millions of records across multiple platforms and databases. Melissa’s Unis

SD Times news digest: DevOps Institute announces tiered memberships, Cloudera Data Platform now available on GCP, Perforce announces C++ coverage in its static code analysis solution

The DevOps Institute launched a new tiered membership program which includes Basic, Premium, Government/Nonprofit, Educator and Enterprise Membership options to help advance the careers of DevOps and IT leaders.  Basic membership gives DevOps users an introductory glimpse into what DevOps Institute’s membership program offers and includes limited membership benefits.  The Premium Membership gives anyone working and leading in the DevOps space an edge on the latest DevOps trends as well as team assessment of DevOps capabilities, a new SKILbook with up to $3,000 in savings in the first year and more. Additional details on all of the other tiers are available here.  Cloudera Data Platform now available on GCP The Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) is a hybrid and multi-cloud data and analytics platform that offers security and governance for the world’s largest enterprises.  The addition of CDP for Google Cloud enables Cloudera to deliver on its promise to offer its enterprise data platf

Google rolls out FLoC as privacy-preserving alternative to third-party cookie tracking

In an attempt to improve user privacy while still providing a viable way for publishers to make money through advertising, Google is adding Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) as a developer origin trial in Chrome.  According to the company, when other browsers started blocking third-party cookies, advertisers and sites began putting up workarounds. In many cases the workarounds were actually worse for privacy than cookies. “Overall, we felt that blocking third-party cookies outright without viable alternatives for the ecosystem was irresponsible, and even harmful, to the free and open web we all enjoy,” Marshall Vale, product manager of Privacy Sandbox at Google, wrote in a post .  FLoC allows publishers to present relevant ads to groups of people, or cohorts, instead of targeting ads at individuals. It looks at browsing history to determine what cohort to place a user in. Users can also be moved to different cohorts as their browsing history changes. RELATED CONTENT: Google’s P

Visual Studio Marketplace alternative joins the Eclipse Foundation

The Open VSX Registry was transferred from TypeFox to the Eclipse Foundation and it now offers an alternative to the Microsoft Visual Studio Marketplace for VS Code extensions.  The goal behind the transition was to increase flexibility for extension users, extension publishers and tool developers since the Visual Studio Marketplace doesn’t allow for extensions with the increasing number of open-source tools and technologies that support the VS Code extension API, the Eclipse Foundation explained.  The Open VSX Registry is built on the Eclipse Open VSX project and it allows for the use of extensions from VS Code and forks of VS Code such as VSCodium, to Eclipse Theia, Eclipse Che, Gitpod, Coder, and SAP Business Application Studio. “Following a true open source model, all aspects of the Open VSX Registry are guided by the community based on our proven governance framework and processes for entrepreneurial collaboration,” Mike Milinkovich, the executive director of the Eclipse Founda

Project Reunion 0.5 lets Windows developers utilize latest technologies in apps

Microsoft has announced the release of Project Reunion 0.5. Project Reunion aims to encourage developers to build Windows applications by providing them with the latest Windows technologies and new features by decoupling features from the operating system. This means developers don’t need to wait for the operating system to update with those new features in order to use them. “You’ve told us that typically you have to wait for your users to update to the latest Windows OS before you can consider adopting the latest features and integrating them into your app. For some of you that could mean a 1-2 year delay in a new feature being available, you being able to adopt it, and users seeing it in apps. Now, you can take the latest Project Reunion release whenever you want to get the latest features and can feel confident that they’ll work for all your users on Windows 10 version 1809 – which is the current Enterprise LTSC – and newer,” Andrew Clinick, partner group program manager at Micr

SD Times news digest: Tricentis acquires Neotys, Cloudera SQL Stream Builder, Next.js 10.1 released

Tricentis acquired the testing platform Neotys to further expand its AI-driven, end-to-end continuous testing platform to accelerate software delivery and innovation.  NeoLoad, the performance testing solution for enterprises looking to verify application response time, availability, and scalability for mobile, web and packaged applications will be added to the Tricentis portfolio.  “Today’s Agile and DevOps teams are looking for ways to be more strategic and eliminate manual tasks and implement automated solutions to work more efficiently and effectively. As part of Tricentis, we’ll be able to eliminate laborious testing tasks to allow teams to focus on high-value analysis and performance engineering,” said Thibaud Bussière, the president and co-founder of Neotys. Cloudera SQL Stream Builder Eventador’s SQL Stream Builder is now being relaunched as Cloudera SQL Stream Builder after Cloudera’s acquisition of the company late last year.  It is now fully integrated with Cloudera’s D

Passing the test of complex technologies

Seemingly small technological failings can have enormous consequences. When they are strung together in complex systems, the results can be catastrophic.   In 1996, Europe’s then-newest unmanned satellite-launching rocket, the Ariane 5, exploded just seconds after taking off on its maiden flight from French Guiana. Onboard was a $500 million set of four scientific satellites created to study how the Earth’s magnetic field interacts with solar winds. According to the New York Times Magazine , the rocket’s self-destruction was triggered when its guidance computer tried to convert a 64-bit floating-point number concerning the rocket’s lateral velocity into a 16-bit integer, resulting in an overflow error that shut the guidance system down. It then passed control to an identical backup computer, but the second computer had also failed the same way at the same time because it was running the same software. Three years later, NASA’s $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter burned up in the Mart

Different Types of ROM Zainab Sutarwala The Crazy Programmer

ROM is Read-Only Memory and the most important type of electronic storage, which comes in-built to the device during manufacturing. You must have seen ROM chips in your computers and other electronic products; game consoles, VCRs, and even car radios all of them use ROM for completing their functions effectively and smoothly. ROM chips generally come built-in the external unit – just like flash drives or other auxiliary devices –and are installed in the hardware of a device on the removable chip. The non-volatile memory of ROM stays viable even without the power supply. In this post, we will learn more about ROM and different types of ROM to check out: What is ROM ROM is a solid-state memory that will read-only data stored. Its feature is that when data gets stored, it will not be changed and deleted. As mentioned before, it is mainly used in the computer and various electronic devices, even though the power gets turned off, data won’t disappear. The widely used type of primary stor

Report: The ability to quickly adapt to change is what sets leaders apart

Ninety-nine percent of business leaders of the most successful companies believe their organizations are ready to quickly adapt to change, and this is what sets them apart from the rest of their industry. This is according to a study from work management solution provider Planview : “ The State of Strategy Execution: Embracing Uncertainty to Adapt at Speed ,” which surveyed 1000 global business professionals.  The report broke down companies into three categories: the Laggards who are slower to respond to change, the Challengers who move forward in starts and stops, and the Leaders who are the fastest organizations.    According to the report, Leaders are three times as likely than Challenges to exceed financial targets, three times as likely to exceed strategic objectives, and two times as likely to exceed delivery of innovative products and services.  In order to see the benefits that these Leaders are experiencing, companies will need to adopt some of the same strategies. Accor

SD Times news digest: PHP moves to GitHub, OSI’s statement on Stallman, and Ian Kelling joins FSF board of directors

The PHP programming language team has announced its repositories on GitHub are now canonical and changes should be pushed directly to GitHub rather than to git.php.net. This change follows two malicious commits that were pushed to the php-src repo. “While investigation is still underway, we have decided that maintaining our own git infrastructure is an unnecessary security risk, and that we will discontinue the git.php.net server,” Nikita Popov, an open-source contributor to PHP wrote in a post . OSI’s statement on Stallman The Open Source Initiative stated that it is against the reappointment of Richard Stallman to a leadership position at the Free Software Foundation.  OSI also said that it will not collaborate with the FSF until Stallman is removed from the organization’s leadership. Other organizations such as Red Hat have made similar statements .  “Free and open source software will not be accessible to all until it is safe for everyone to participate, and we therefore ca

Four key metrics for measuring DevOps productivity

A recent report found the four best ways to measure DevOps productivity is to look at: duration, mean time to recovery, throughput and success rate. According to the State of Software Delivery report from CI/CD platform provider CircleCI, companies who optimize on those four metrics are some of the most successful software companies out there.  In a webinar on how to help teams build better software faster, technical content marketing manager at CircleCI Ron Powell and Contentful software engineer Sergiy Tupchiy looked at the four metrics and what it really looks like in practice.  “It does look different when you try to actually apply the measurement of these to your case. And then it also looks different when you try to describe the value of optimizing on these four metrics to the rest of your organization,” Powell explained in the webinar.  The first metric, duration, measures the length of a workflow. While teams want to be around five minutes, Powell found the 50th percentile

Boruvka’s Algorithm with Implementation in Java Vijay Sinha The Crazy Programmer

In this article, we will have a look at another interesting algorithm related to Graph Theory – Boruvka’s Algorithm . We will also look at a problem with respect to this algorithm, discuss our approach and analyze the complexities. Boruvka’s Algorithm is mainly used to find or derive a Minimum Spanning Tree of an Edge-weighted Graph. Let us have a quick look at the concept of a Minimum Spanning Tree. A Minimum Spanning Tree or a MST is a subset of edges of a Weighted, Un-directed graph; such that it connects all the vertices together. The resultant subset of the graph must have no cycles or loops within it. Moreover, It should have minimum possible total weight of the edges connecting the tree. Note: The Minimum Spanning Tree should connect all its vertices. A disconnected graph is not a MST. Let us understand this with an example, consider this graph: The above shown graph is an Edge-Weighted, undirected graph with 6 vertices. The minimum Spanning tree of the above graph loo

PyTorch 1.8.1 comes with PyTorch Profiler

The latest version of the machine learning library PyTorch is now available. PyTorch 1.8.1 introduces the PyTorch Profiler, which is a tool for performance analysis and troubleshooting for large-scale deep learning models.  According to PyTorch’s team, there was a lack of available tools for such a task, and the tools that did exist missed out on important PyTorch-specific information. Machine learning scientists ended up needing to use a combination of tools or manually adding correlation information in order to meet their needs.  PyTorch Profiler collects both GPU hardware and PyTorch information, correlates them, performs detection of model bottlenecks, and generates recommendations on how to ease those bottlenecks. The information is visualized in TensorBoard so the user can easily see it. In addition, the new Profiler API is natively supported in PyTorch, which means users don’t need to install additional packages in order to make use of the tool.  Other new improvements in

Red Hat suspends funding to the Free Software Foundation

The aftermath of Richard Stallman rejoining the Free Software Foundation (FSF) continues as a long-time donor and contributor suspends its funding to the foundation. Red Hat announced that it will suspend any Red Hat funding to the FSF and any FSF-related event. Red Hat contributors have also announced they plan to stop participating in FSF-led or backed events.  The company announced that it was “appalled to learn” that Stallman had rejoined the foundation’s board of directors.  While the FSF says it is taking steps to adopt a transparent and formal process to identifying board candidates and appointing new members, Red Hat doesn’t believe this signals any meaningful commitment to positive change.”  RELATED CONTENT: The free software community calls for the removal of entire FSF board “In 2019, we called on the FSF board to use the opportunity created by Stallman’s departure to transition to a more diverse, inclusive board membership. The FSF took only limited steps in this dir

SD Times news digest: Rust 1.51 released, Amazon Lookout for Metrics, and D language 2.096

The latest Rust version (1.51) presents some of the largest additions to the Rust language and Cargo in a while, while stabilizing an MVP of const generics and a new feature resolver for Cargo. Const Generics MVP is a powerful new feature that enables developers to write reusable code with no runtime overhead and now the new version makes it easier to be generic over the values of those types. This change lets developers have their own array struct that’s generic over its type and its length.  RELATED CONTENT: What’s all the fuss about Rust? For Cargo, the release adds a new resolver option in Cargo.toml, where developers can set resolver=”2″ to tell cargo to try a new approach to resolving features.  Additional details are available here . Amazon Lookout for Metrics now available Amazon Lookout for Metrics uses machine learning to detect and determine the root cause of anomalies in business metrics.  Traditional rule-based methods for identifying anomalies are usually manual a

SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: Open MCT

The Open Mission Control Technologies (Open MCT) is NASA’s open-source project for mission control software. It was developed at NASA’s Ames Research Center in collaboration with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a next-generation mission control framework for data visualization.  NASA currently uses it for data analysis on spacecraft missions, and to support the development of lunar rover mission concepts. According to NASA, it provides integrated situational awareness, health monitoring, and telemetry display.  “As a generalizable and open source framework, Open MCT could be used as the basis for building applications for planning, operation, and analysis of any systems producing telemetry data, according to the project’s website . “At NASA, the requirements for Open MCT are being driven by a need to support distributed operations, access to data anywhere, data visualization for spacecraft analysis that spans multiple data sources, and flexible reconfiguration to support multiple

Remembering Pat Sarica

When SD Times started in 1999, we began interviewing for a copy editor. One resume immediately stood out from the rest. It was from a woman named Pat Sarica, who died last month at the age of 66. Though Pat wasn’t working with us then, having gone to work in the publications department at New York’s Stony Brook University, her imprint on the paper (and on our corporate culture) was unmistakable. Pat was the personification of what we call today “the grammar police.” She was curmudgeonly, disgruntled, often ill-tempered and mostly intolerant of anything in the office that wasn’t working toward getting the paper out the door — basically, everything you’d want in a copy chief and managing editor, a position she attained not long after joining us. But she had a warm, funny side as well, telling us of her life with her beloved mother, her cats and her pride in her nephew, Jimmy. But in our office, perhaps her best line was when she once called copy editors “publishing’s equivalent of post

Report: Majority of development teams being held back from moving quickly

Despite the industry-wide fixation on developing and deploying faster, new data shows that a majority of development teams are held back from deploying software as fast as they’d like.  The study, conducted by continuous code improvement platform Rollbar , found that this was the case for 84% of developers. The top reasons for delays are difficulty in fixing errors and bugs (36%), teams being too small (30%), budget limitations (16%), other people in the organization using traditional methodologies that don’t sync with development plans (15%), inaccurate project management (13%), lack of leadership (10%), and a lack of long-term vision (9%). “Developers want to have an idea, write it in code, and have the user experience that idea,” said Cory Virok, CTO and co-founder at Rollbar. “But the reality is that the code that’s meant to deliver these experiences is often riddled with errors and bugs. In an effort to provide a stellar customer experience, developers are spending up to 40%

Open Collective launches Funds to financially support open-source communities

Open Collective is trying to make working full-time for an open-source project an alternative to a career developing for a for-profit company. It believes the steps to achieve this goal include eliminating friction between projects, the communities that support them, and the corporations that depend on them.  It is introducing Funds to its open funding management platform to make it easier for companies to invest in open-source projects by making a one-time payment to a Fund, which then redistributes the money to different projects and contributors, rather than paying those projects individually.  “Big companies call the process for paying for stuff ‘procurement.’ It’s often pretty involved, with contracts, invoices, purchasing order numbers, and bureaucracy—a painful thing to go through repeatedly for small amounts. It’s practically a blocker. It is so much simpler and more practical to ask corporations to make one large payment, to one vendor. Make it easy and companies will invest

How to improve the state of women in technology

It should come as no surprise that the tech industry is a very male-dominated one. In fact, a 2020 survey from Adeva IT showed that women make up only 25% of the tech workforce.  “The solution [to this under-representation] requires collaboration and allyship,” said Janeya Griffin, founder and CEO of The Commercializer, which provides consulting services to minority-serving institutions. In celebration of Women’s History Month, SpringBoard Incubators and sportswear company Sean John hosted the State of Women In Technology , which was a panel featuring several women from different areas of technology to discuss their experiences, and how the industry can do better. Speakers included Cheresse Owens-Petty, senior manager of digital learning at Marriott International ; Kerry O’Brien, a registered nurse who does a lot of work around bringing technology into nursing to improve patient outcomes; Charlie Oliver, founder and CEO of Tech 2025 ; Alicia Ray, senior manager of product mark

SD Times news digest: Microsoft Team’s new bug bounty program, FSF’s board statement on governance, and Open Source Initiative’s election hacked and remediation

Microsoft announced bug bounty awards for Teams desktop client security research under the new Microsoft Applications Bug Bounty Program.  The program includes five scenario-based awards for vulnerabilities that have the highest potential impact on customer privacy and security and also general bounty awards for other valid reports for the Teams desktop client that don’t qualify for scenario-based awards. Also, valid reports for Microsoft Teams research are now eligible for a 2x bonus multiplier under the Researcher Recognition Program.  FSF’s board statement on governance The Free Software Foundation board of directors committed to a series of changes regarding organizational governance and the appointment of members to its board. The statement comes after calls from the free software community to remove the entire FSF board .  The foundation said it will adopt a transparent and formal process for identifying candidates and appointing new board members that are committed to FSF’s

Credential Stuffing Attacks – Definition, Detection and Prevention Neeraj Mishra The Crazy Programmer

A credential stuffing attack is a cybercrime technique where attackers use automated scripts and try them on a targeted website. It happens because the majority of users repeat similar credentials on more than one account. That means one data threat can also threaten several others. The attackers use tools like Sentry MBA to test such certificates in the highly automated bulk effort. Sometimes theft succeeds in login in allowing them to take advantage of services, stored credit card numbers, and other personal information. The attackers inject username and password pairs to try unauthorized access to user accounts. Therefore, organizations need to stress the importance of using different passwords if one has more than one account. Using duplicate passwords for different accounts can be hazardous because once the hackers get to know one of the passwords; they will get access to any of your other accounts. When you understand different ways that attackers use to access your business i

LeanIX adds microservice intelligence and Cleanshelf to its portfolio

The enterprise architecture and cloud governance company LeanIX made new SaaS management and microservices updates to its portfolio this week. The company announced it has acquired Cleanshelf, a SaaS management provider; and added Microservice Intelligence to its Continuous Transformation Platform.  Cleanshelf’s software provides an automated view of all SaaS applications in an enterprise, simplifies management and enables resource optimization, according to the company.  LeanIX went on to explain that while SaaS adoption is rapidly increasing, it’s happening in a decentralized way, making it difficult to manage costs, security risk and data privacy. RELATED CONTENT: The resurgence of enterprise architecture Cleanshelf believes by automatically identifying SaaS applications throughout the enterprise and detecting unused licenses, it can minimize costs by about 15% in the first year. It’s tool is based on integrations with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tools, spend and contract