feed on feeds - 2018/08/21 - items 0 to 15

Programmers may love hot newer languages like Kotlin and Rust, but according to a Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF) recent survey of global enterprise developers and IT decision makers, Java and Javascript are the top enterprise languages. ZDNet: That said, the CFF also found [PDF] that, "More and more, businesses are employing a polyglot and a multi-platform strategy to meet their exact needs." The CFF discovered 77 percent of enterprises are using or evaluating Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS); 72 percent are using or considering containers; and 46 percent are using or thinking about serverless computing. Simultaneously, more than a third (39 percent) are using all three technologies together. For companies this "flexibility of cloud-native practices enables [companies to move] away from a monolithic approach and towards a world of computing that is flexible, portable and interoperable." That means, while Java and JavaScript are only growing ever more popular, the larger the company, the more languages are used. After the Java twins, C++, C#, Python, and PHP are the most popular languages.

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A project, more than a decade in the making, sees young eagles released in a bid to boost declining numbers.

Scores of Czechoslovakians were killed in Prague after Soviet Union cracked down on anti-communist protesters in 1968.

Jury finds Manafort guilty of eight charges, including tax fraud, but fails to reach verdict on 10 other counts.

Verizon Wireless's throttling of a fire department that uses its data services has been submitted as evidence in a lawsuit that seeks to reinstate federal net neutrality rules. From a report: "County Fire has experienced throttling by its ISP, Verizon," Santa Clara County Fire Chief Anthony Bowden wrote in a declaration. "This throttling has had a significant impact on our ability to provide emergency services. Verizon imposed these limitations despite being informed that throttling was actively impeding County Fire's ability to provide crisis-response and essential emergency services." Bowden's declaration was submitted in an addendum to a brief filed by 22 state attorneys general, the District of Columbia, Santa Clara County, Santa Clara County Central Fire Protection District, and the California Public Utilities Commission. The government agencies are seeking to overturn the recent repeal of net neutrality rules in a lawsuit they filed against the Federal Communications Commission in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. "The Internet has become an essential tool in providing fire and emergency response, particularly for events like large fires which require the rapid deployment and organization of thousands of personnel and hundreds of fire engines, aircraft, and bulldozers," Bowden wrote. Santa Clara Fire paid Verizon for "unlimited" data but suffered from heavy throttling until the department paid Verizon more, according to Bowden's declaration and emails between the fire department and Verizon that were submitted as evidence.

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Seattle Xcoders started in 2004, I think. I was invited as a guest speaker in 2005, and I attended — and I never stopped going.

Well, I don’t always make it to the actual meeting the last few years, but I do attend the after-thing at the Cyclops.

And here’s why: it goes back to that very first meeting I attended 13 years ago, when I realized that seeing people regularly in real life is a fine and healthy idea.

Even for a solid introvert like me. Especially for introverts like me.

And now that we’re all replacing Twitter with other things for our social needs — with Mastodon for some people, Micro.blog for some (including me), Slack, Snapchat, plus falling back to the usual things like blogs and texting and email — we should remember that regular hanging-out-with-folks is massively important.

The Xcoders meetings are good and sometimes great. But the fact that it’s a social club also is not to be minimized or glossed-over — it’s super-important.

* * *

There’s an unofficial Seattle Xcoders (no meeting) this Thursday at 7 pm at the Cyclops. You don’t have to be a coder to attend — designers, testers, writers, and lovers of Mac and iOS apps are all welcome and encouraged.

I won’t actually be at this Thursday’s thing this time (though I’m usually there) — but a week from Thursday (Aug. 30) is our special fifth Thursday unofficial at the Waterwheel in Ballard, and I’ll be there. It’s doubly unofficial — and a whole bunch of fun.

* * *

Just for fun, I thought I’d estimate how many times I’ve hung out with some of the original Xcoders such as Gus Mueller. Let’s call it an average 24 events a year, and let’s say we’re both at 12 of them. Over 13 years that’s 156 times.

I’ve probably said to him “Gus was the name of my cat” at least 100 of those times.

There's hopes that a new project in Scotland will re-introduce Golden Eagles in England and Wales.

Hamas and Israel have discussed easing the devastating blockade but not a complete lifting of it.

Venezuela - once the richest country in Latin America - is coping with one of the worst economic disasters in the world.

Ethnic Chinese Buddhist found guilty of 'insulting Islam' and jailed 18 months for complaining about mosque loudspeaker.

Lawyer who gained notoriety as Trump's loyal "fixer" reportedly strikes plea deal with prosecutors on multiple charges.

Citing a report [PDF] published on Tuesday by Digital Content Next and Vanderbilt University, CNN writes that "short of chucking your phone into the river, shunning the internet, and learning to read paper maps again, there's not much you can do to keep Google from collecting data about you." From the report: So says a Vanderbilt University computer scientist who led an analysis of Google's data collection practices. His report, released Tuesday, outlines a myriad ways the company amasses information about the billions of people who use the world's leading search engine, web browser, and mobile operating system, not to mention products like Gmail, platforms like YouTube, and products like Nest. Although the report doesn't contain any bombshells, it presents an overview of Google's efforts to learn as much as possible about people. And it comes at a time of heightened concern about how much information tech companies collect, what they do with it, and how they secure it. Google has largely escaped the public and regulatory backlash directed at Facebook. "There's been a lot of attention obviously on Facebook in light of Cambridge Analytica," said Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, which published the study. (DCN is a trade organization representing media publishers, including CNN.) "This quantifies and kind of establishes a baseline of, 'Here is everything Google is doing.'" According to the 55-page report, Google is doing a lot.

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Dave Winer wants to get Frontier running on Linux. Any port is a big job, but this is probably much easier than porting Frontier as-is to current macOS.

Moscow gave the secondhand aircraft to Serbia for free after they underwent extensive overhauls.

Mozilla announced today plans to remove all Firefox legacy add-ons from the official Mozilla add-ons portal in early October. From a report: The move comes after Mozilla updated the Firefox core to use a new add-ons system based on the Chrome-compatible WebExtensions API. This new add-ons API replaced Firefox's old XUL-based add-ons API in November 2017, with the release of Firefox 57. All Firefox legacy add-ons stopped working in Firefox 57, but Mozilla continued to support them in the Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) 52 branch. Support for Firefox ESR 52 will end on September 5, in two weeks, meaning there won't be any official Firefox version that supports legacy add-ons anymore.

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