DeviceGuru writes: Results from LinuxGizmos.com's annual hacker-friendly single board computer survey are in, and not surprisingly, the Raspberry Pi 3 is the most desired maker SBC by a 4-to-1 margin. In other trends: x86 SBCs and Linux/Arduino hybrids have trended upwards. The site's popular hacker SBC survey polled 1,705 survey respondents and asked for their first, second, and third favorite SBCs from a curated list of 98 community oriented, Linux- and Android-capable boards. Spreadsheets comparing all 98 SBCs' specs and listing their survey vote tallies are available in freely downloadable Google Docs. Other interesting findings: "A Raspberry Pi SBC has won in all four of our annual surveys, but never by such a high margin."The second-highest ranked board -- behind the Raspberry Pi 3 -- was the Raspberry Pi Zero W."The Raspberry Pi's success came despite the fact that it offers some of the weakest open source hardware support in terms of open specifications. This, however, matches up with our survey responses about buying criteria, which ranks open source software support and community over open hardware support.""Despite the accelerating Raspberry Pi juggernaut, there's still plenty of experimentation going on with new board models, and to a lesser extent, new board projects."

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Health care is socialist is getting a bunch of new reads today thanks to some powerful RTs.

Authorities seize weapons and explosives, but do not say how many were detained, or where the operation took place.

Governor's office bans event for third year in a row, but organisers wow to hold it despite threats by various groups.

Walmart Canada claims that it was microservices that allowed them to replace hardware with virtual servers, reducing costs by somewhere between 20 and 50 percent. Now Slashdot reader snydeq shares an article by a senior systems automation engineer arguing that a microservices approach "offers increased modularity, making applications easier to develop, test, deploy, and, more importantly, change and maintain." The article touts things like cost savings and flexibility for multiple device types, suggesting microservices offer increased resilience and improved scalabiity (not to mention easier debugging and a faster time to market with an incremental development model). But it also warns that organizations need the resources to deploy the new microservices quicky (and the necessary server) -- along with the ability to test and monitor them for database errors, network latency, caching issues and ongoing availability. "You must embrace devops culture," argues the article, adding that "designing for failure is essential... In a traditional setting, developers are focused on features and functionalities, and the operations team is on the hook for production challenges. In devops, everyone is responsible for service provisioning -- and failure." The original submission ends with a question for Slashdot reader. "What cautions do you have to offer for folks considering tapping microservices for their next application?"

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Editor and validator for systemd configuration files

L wrapping for F

Constant variables for RPi::WiringPi

Convert vFiles into equivalent XML

resizable/movable panel mixin for Tickit widgets

Access and manipulate Raspberry Pi GPIO pins

desktop-like float management implementation for Tickit

shortcuts for writing Tickit apps

generate XS code to import C header constants

"Guido Vranken recently published 4 security vulnerabilities in OpenVPN on his personal blog," writes long-time Slashdot reader randomErr -- one of which was a critical remote execution bug. Though patches have been now released, there's a lesson to be learned about the importance of fuzzing -- bug testing with large amounts of random data -- Guido Vranken writes: Most of these issues were found through fuzzing. I hate admitting it, but...the arcane art of reviewing code manually, acquired through grueling practice, are dwarfed by the fuzzer in one fell swoop; the mortal's mind can only retain and comprehend so much information at a time, and for programs that perform long cycles of complex, deeply nested operations it is simply not feasible to expect a human to perform an encompassing and reliable verification. ZDNet adds that "OpenVPN's audits, carried out over the past two years, missed these major flaws. While a handful of other bugs are found, perhaps OpenVPN should consider adding fuzzing to their internal security analysis in the future." Guido adds on his blog, "This was a labor of love. Nobody paid me to do this. If you appreciate this effort, please donate BTC..."

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