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Free Software Foundation award winners announced

The winners of Free Software Foundation’s 2021 Software Awards for achievements in the field of free software, are SecuRepairs, Paul Eggert, and Protesilaos Stavrou. SecuRepairs was the winner of the Award for Projects of Social Benefit, which is presented to a project or team responsible for applying free software, or the ideas of the free software movement to benefit society.  SecuRepairs helps to provide factual advice on information security issues like data privacy as they pertain to repairing devices and software, and works to help combat the anti-right-to-repair narrative spread by certain large hardware manufacturers. “Right to repair is about declaring once and for all that we are the owners of our stuff: our phones, our laptops, our home appliances, television sets, automobiles, and farm equipment. We are not tenants of multinational corporations who want to sell us things and then dictate the conditions and terms under which we can use them,” said Paul Roberts, the founde

Olive and NTT DATA Join Forces to Accelerate the Global Development and Deployment of AI Solutions

U.S.A., March 14, 2021 — Olive , the automation company creating the Internet of Healthcare, today announced an alliance with NTT DATA , a global digital business and IT services leader. The collaboration will fast track the creation of new healthcare solutions to transform the health experience for humans — both in the traditional healthcare setting and at home. As a member of Olive’s Deploy, Develop and Distribute Partnership Programs , NTT DATA is leveraging Olive’s open platform to innovate, build and distribute solutions to Olive’s customers, which include some of the country’s largest health providers. Olive and NTT DATA will co-develop new Loops — applications that work on Olive’s platform to provide humans real-time intelligence — and new machine learning and robotic process automation (RPA) models. NTT DATA and Olive will devote an early focus to enabling efficiencies in supply chain and IT, with other disciplines to follow. “This is an exciting period of growth at Olive, so

New InstallAware X15 with Context Menu Bridge for Windows 11

San Francisco, CA, March 21, 2022 – Install Aware Software, the technology leader in software installation, repackaging, and virtualization solutions for application builders and enterprises, is launching Install Aware X15 on Friday this week. Install Aware is the most flexible platform for traditional and agile development teams creating Windows and Azure software installers, as well as MSIX, APPX, App-V Virtualization, agentless/royalty-free Install Aware Virtualization packages. Until the recent release of Windows 11, software developers had a straightforward way to inject their own menu items into the “context menus” shown in the Windows File Explorer. The context menu is shown when end-users highlight a group of files and/or folders, and subsequently click their selection using the right mouse button. This menu is typically customized by third party apps so end-users have a quick way to access core product functionality. For example, DiskZIP injects “ Add to 7ZIP ” to this co

Python Declare Variable Without Value Gorakh Gupta The Crazy Programmer

We know that in many languages like C, C++, Java, when we want to use any variable then first we have to declare that variable and after that, we can use that variable in our program. The languages listed above are high-level languages that are compiled before it runs, but Python is a dynamically compiled language. In python, we don’t have to specify which type of variable we are going to use. Simply we have to write the name of a variable and we can use it as per our own like we can store an integer value or a string value in the same variable. So the question comes, is it possible to declare a variable without value in python? The answer is no, we cannot declare a variable without value in python. I will demonstrate an example to prove my point. Let us see a basic addition of 2 numbers program in Python. num1 = int ( input ( " Enter Number 1 : " ) ) num2 = int ( input( " Enter Number 2 : " ) ) print ( f " Sum is { num1 + num2 } " ) Output: PS C :

Android announces Developer Preview 2

Android announced its Developer Preview 2 which focuses on additional features and changes on top of last month’s original preview.  The new preview comes after the 12L feature drop was moved to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) last week, enabling developers to take advantage of over 250+ million large-screen Android devices.  Android 13 Developer Preview 2 introduces a new runtime permission for sending notifications from an app: ‘POST_NOTIFICATIONS’ to help users focus on the most important notifications.  Apps in Android 13 will now need to ask permission from users before they can post notifications.  Also included is a new API to let apps protect user privacy by downgrading previously granted runtime permissions and the safer exporting of context-registered receivers.  Android 13 will offer improved Japanese text wrapping,  line heights for non-Latin scripts, and apps can call the new text conversion API so users can find what they’re looking for faster and easier. Andr

Developers need learning, skills to tackle security

Pieter Danhieux has an impressive background in cybersecurity. And he acknowledges that when it comes to building software, problems in the code lead to security issues. Yet he blames this problem not on the developers themselves, but on what he has seen as “a lot of things we’ve done wrong with developers.” Organizations, he said, have given development teams tools they’re not familiar with and don’t know how to use. Further, developers are actually split over their role in security. While some have embraced secure coding practices, others still have not. “Developers say security is slowing me down,” said Danhieux, the CEO of Secure Code Warrior, a company that takes a holistic view of software security. “They just want to release new features as quickly as they can. The friction (developers have) with security teams still exists.” Meanwhile, colleges and universities are not including safety and security as part of their software engineering curricula, This is leaving new developer

SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: FastTreeSHAP

FastTreeSHAP is a Python package that enables the efficient interpretation of tree-based machine learning models by computing sample-level feature importance values.2 The project was recently open-sourced by LinkedIn and was used at the company to improve member experience in products such as People You May Know (PYMK), newsfeed ranking, search, and job recommendations, as well as customer-facing products within sales and marketing. The FastTreeSHAP open-source package implements the algorithms FastTreeSHAP v1 and FastTreeSHAP v2 that make the packages 1.5x and 2.5x times faster than TreeSHAP, respectively.  Parallel multi-core computing is fully enabled in the FastTreeSHAP package and it contains the same API as the TreeSHAP implementation in the SHAP package, with the exception of three additional arguments which are easy to tune in practice. “SHAP calculates the average impact of adding a feature to the model by accounting for all possible subsets of the other features. In contr

Google Play introduces updates for users to find apps optimized for their screen

The Android development team has announced changes being made in Google Play in order to allow users to discover and engage with high quality apps and games on large or foldable screens.  These changes are being introduced as three main updates: ranking and promotability changes, alerts for low quality apps, and device-specific ratings and reviews. In the coming months, the team will be updating the featuring and ranking logic in Play on large screen devices. This works to prioritize high quality apps based on app quality guidelines. This update is intended to help users locate the apps that are best optimized for their device. This update also brings a deeper investment in editorial content across Play to highlight apps that have been optimized for large screens. The second update will change current alerts to users on large screens in order to help them manage their expectations for how apps will look and function after installation. This will help to let users know that certain

Why backup open source code? GitProtect.io improves data protection of Open Source Projects

It’s not enough to say that Open Source Software has changed the IT world. Its popularity grows together with a growing tech-savvy population, flexibility to alter the code, and an exponentially increasing number of free, open-source projects. Developing and deploying open-source software is not just an idyllic idea – those projects are indeed shaping a modern, fast-changing digital world. The numbers speak for themselves The open-source services market, estimated at $21,7 billion in 2021, is on course to more than double within five years. Speaking precisely, according to MarketsandMarkets’ newest report, it will grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 18.2%, to reach USD 50.0 billion by 2026. But there is the other side of the coin here. Once people handle and process more code and switch to open source more than ever before, it might present compatibility issues, inherent vulnerabilities, the threat of cyberattacks, and a wide range of possible human mistakes. That

Android Play Developer Reporting API unlocks greater analytics

Android developers will now have access to better analytics of how their apps are doing with the new Play Developer Reporting API .  Previously developers could use the Google Play Console to track app performance, but some feedback that the Android team has received is that developers want to be able to track app vitals outside of the Play Console.  The new API will let developers utilize data from developer accounts. The initial release includes access to four core vitals:  Crash rate ANR rate Excessive wake-up rate Stuck background wake-lock rate Developers will also be able to view anomalies, breakdowns, and up to three years of metric history.  According to the Android development team, example use cases that are now enabled include building an internal dashboard, joining different datasets for deeper analysis, and automating troubleshooting and releases.  More information, including how to use the API and best practices, is available in this blog post .  The post An

Go 1.18 released as biggest update to language yet

The Go development team has announced that the 1.18 release of the language is here. According to the team, this release is the biggest change to the language to-date.  “It isn’t a stretch to say that the design for parts of Go 1.18 started over a decade ago when we first released Go,” the Go team wrote in a blog post .  One new addition in Go 1.18 is support for generics , which enables functions and data structures to be represented in a generic way.  The support in this release will support many common use cases, and future releases of Go will continue to add support for more complicated situations. Go 1.18 also fully integrates fuzzing , which inputs random data into a test in order to find vulnerabilities or bugs.   Another new feature in this release is the Go workspace mode that enables developers to more easily work with multiple modules. Go modules are a popular feature leveraged by most Go developers, but the 2021 user survey revealed that a main challenge of working w

Cloudflare launches new way for companies to protect their APIs

Web performance company Cloudflare today announced the release of the Cloudflare API Gateway. This release is geared at providing organizations with a simple, fast, and effective way to protect and control all of their APIs. Cloudflare API Gateway simplifies the process of identifying, securing, and managing APIs of any protocol all on one network.  According to Cloudflare, API traffic generates more than 50% of all the HTTP requests on Cloudflare’s global network. With this, it is more important than ever for businesses to protect and maintain a clear view of their API suite.  With this release, organizations will be able to: Identify and stop API abuse by leveraging Cloudflare’s Machine Learning engine that processes 32+ million requests per second  Automatically detect unmanaged APIs through passive scans of the entire network that produce lists of API endpoints for complete visibility  Create and manage lightweight, dynamic APIs that run at the edge directly with Cloudflare w

Report: 4 critical benchmarks of successful development teams

CircleCI today released the findings of its 2022 State of Software Delivery Report , revealing the four critical benchmarks that the majority of successful engineers meet.  These include:  Workflow durations are between 5-10 minutes on average  Recovery from any failed run is fixed or reverted in under an hour Success rates are above 90% for the default branch of the application They deploy as often as their business requires and at least 1+ times per day Additionally, the report found that holiday season downtime brings increased risk to a business. According to the report, this can be combated by setting up a robust test suite to back up teams and enable innovation even when members are out of the office. The report also showed that organizations that prioritized an optimal team structure had higher success levels. Meaning that making simple changes to day-to-day business practices in order to ensure that meetings don’t conflict with peak productivity hours can be highly b

CNCF accepts Backstage as incubating project

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has voted to accept a new platform for building developer portals as an incubating project. Backstage enables developers to bring together their organization’s tooling, services, apps, data, and documentation into a single UI.  The project has its origins at Spotify. In 2016 the company was growing quickly and struggling to onboard engineers fast enough to meet its needs. Creating Backstage enabled Spotify engineers to be more productive and work faster. After using it internally for a few years, Spotify open-sourced the project in March 2020 and then later that year in September it entered the CNCF Sandbox.  Since joining the CNCF Backstage has seen growth across its core components and features. Maintainers have focused efforts into updating, refining, documenting, deprecating and stabilizing core components in advance of the 1.0 release of the Core Framework, which is still upcoming. The Core Framework includes the Software Catalog

RedisJSON 2.0 introduces new indexing capabilities

Data platform Redis has announced the release of RedisJSON 2.0. RedisJSON is a JSON-standards in-memory database. According to the company, this type of database has many benefits over the commonly used relational databases, which Redis explained can be inflexible and have scaling issues. To help address those shortcomings, RedisJSON offers flexible deployment options, cost savings methods, geo-distribution capabilities, and 99.999% uptime, according to Redis.  This release introduces native indexing, querying, and full-text search capabilities to help developers more easily modernize their applications. Now, indexing can be done synchronously, which means that once an index is created, every write or update operation will show up in the next query or search.  As of this release, the JSON Data Interchange Format is now a native data type, enabling atomic operations on sub-elements, which leads to improved productivity for developers.  According to Redis, this release is ideal for