Openwashing: Facebook, Microsoft/Adobe and More
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Facebook yesterday announced it is open-sourcing BOLT, its "binary optimization and layout tool that accelerates large-scale applications". According to the Facebook post, "BOLT optimizes placement of instructions in memory, thereby reducing CPU execution time by 2 percent to 15 percent. Unlike previous tools to address instruction starvation, BOLT works with applications built by any compiler, including GCC or Clang. Today, we are open-sourcing BOLT so that engineers everywhere can use it alongside complementary technologies like AutoFDO to achieve performance gains for their apps."
How Magento changed its open source approach to get 50% community contributions [Ed: Asay neglects to say that Magento is part of Adobe, which is also paying his salary to write puff pieces like these and push agenda at IDG (Asay is not a developer). Adobe now works for Microsoft (partnership), which helps maybe explains his openwashing of these FOSS foes.]
The theory of open source is community-driven development. The reality, however, is usually different. Most open source projects actually attract very little community. As much as a project like Linux or Kubernetes attracts deep developer involvement, most open source projects toil away in obscurity, the labor of love of a single developer. For commercial open source projects that do see significant contributions, like MongoDB or Red Hat's JBoss, virtually all of those contributions come from developers on a single company's payroll.
| Hyperthreading From Intel Seen as Dodgy, Buggy
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Following the news yesterday of OpenBSD disabling Intel Hyper Threading by default within its OS over security concerns and plans to disable Simultaneous Multi Threading for other processors/architectures too, here are some fresh Intel HT benchmarks albeit on Ubuntu Linux. The OpenBSD developer involved characterized HT/SMT as "doesn't necessarily have a positive effect on performance; it highly depends on the workload. In all likelihood it will actually slow down most workloads if you have a CPU with more than two cores." So here are some benchmarks using a current-generation Intel Core i7 8700K six-core processor with Hyper Threading.
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OpenBSD, an open source operating system that focuses on security, announced that it will disable Intel’s Hyper-Threading (HT) feature so that attackers can no longer employ Spectre-like cache timing attacks.
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The maintainer of open source Unix-like operating system, OpenBSD, has announced that it will disable hyperthreading on Intel CPUs because of security concerns. It claims that simultaneous multithreading creates a potential new attack vector for Spectre-like exploits, and plans to expand its disabling of multithreading technologies to other chip manufacturers in the near future.
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Programming/Development: ISO C++, Rust, FBGraphics and So-called 'DevOps'
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A couple of weeks ago I attended a meeting of the ISO C++ Standards Committee (also known as WG21) in Rapperswil, Switzerland. This was the second committee meeting in 2018; you can find my reports on preceding meetings here (March 2018, Jacksonville) and here (November 2017, Albuquerque), and earlier ones linked from those. These reports, particularly the Jacksonville one, provide useful context for this post.
At this meeting, the committee was focused full-steam on C++20, including advancing several significant features — such as Ranges, Modules, Coroutines, and Executors — for possible inclusion in C++20, with a secondary focus on in-flight Technical Specifications such as the Parallelism TS v2, and the Reflection TS.
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I consider Rust’s RFC process one of our great accomplishments, but it’s no secret that it has a few flaws. At its best, the RFC offers an opportunity for collaborative design that is really exciting to be a part of. At its worst, it can devolve into bickering without any real motion towards consensus. If you’ve not done so already, I strongly recommend reading aturon’s excellent blog posts on this topic.
The RFC process has also evolved somewhat organically over time. What began as “just open a pull request on GitHub” has moved into a process with a number of formal and informal stages (described below). I think it’s a good time for us to take a step back and see if we can refine those stages into something that works better for everyone.
This blog post describes a proposal that arose over some discussions at the Mo
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FBGraphics was made to produce fullscreen pixels effects easily with non-accelerated framebuffer by leveraging multi-core processors, it is a bit like a software GPU (much less complex and featured!), the initial target platform is a Raspberry PI 3B and extend to the NanoPI (and many others embedded devices), the library should just work with many others devices with a Linux framebuffer altough there is at the moment some restrictions on the supported framebuffer format (24 bits).
| Brave/Mozilla News
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As of Firefox 60, the build environment for official Firefox Linux builds switched from CentOS to Debian.
As part of the transition, we overhauled how the build environment for Firefox is constructed. We now populate the environment from deterministic package snapshots and are much more stringent about dependencies and operations being deterministic and reproducible. The end result is that the build environment for Firefox is deterministic enough to enable Firefox itself to be built deterministically.
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We’ve been busy building our new Basic Attention Token (BAT) platform, which includes a new consent-based digital advertising model that benefits users, publishers, and advertisers. Our first phase started last Fall with the integration of BAT into Brave Payments, and enabled users to anonymously distribute contributions to their favorite publishers and creators.
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Brave, the web browser which garnered a huge fan following, predominantly for its ad blocking feature, and depriving advertisers of confiscating private data by blocking trackers is in the news again. And this time, users can earn some cash.
In a blog post, Brave announced that it will be conducting voluntary testing of their new ad model in which they will showcase at least 250 pre-packaged ads to users who will sign up for their early access version. Thus, offering a small amount of money in the form of micropayments.
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