Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Programming
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The 2023 State of Open Source Report confirms security as top issue [Ed: OSI, heavily bribed by Microsoft, is now citing and amplifying Microsofters in typical anti-Linux, anti-FOSS FUD]
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Celebrating the 2023 Opensource.com Community Choice authors
Often our first interaction with open source is through community knowledge bases.
This past year, I have had the fantastic opportunity to work with the many authors here at Opensource.com (and bring in some new ones!). I am fortunate enough to meet with our Correspondents program authors weekly and see some authors at in-person and virtual conferences. We are diverse in our knowledge, locations, backgrounds, and uniquely lived experiences.
Each January, we celebrate the community of authors at Opensource.com. So, (drumroll please), I’m pleased to present the People's Choice Award winners for 2022!
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With First Keynote Announcements, SCALE 2023 Looks Like a ‘Must Attend’ Event
The Southern California Linux Expo, better known as Scale (commonly printed as SCaLE), one of the big tent events on the Linux and open source conference circuit, is bouncing back from the lean Covid years very well.
Last year, back in the saddle after shutting down due to Covid lockdown in 2021, the event snagged as a keynote speaker none other than Vint Cerf, creator of TCP/IP and widely regarded as one of the, if not the, father of the internet. Who wouldn’t want to see that?
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Can open source save the metaverse?
Who knows? It's a mess of old ideas--I'd declared AR was old hat back in 2009--dressed up with new language. But, combined, there may be something novel and worthwhile here. But, neither Meta nor any other company will pull that off. You know who might, though? The newly minted Open Metaverse Foundation (OMF), that's who.
Why do I think an open-source approach might succeed when Meta Reality Labs alone has spent billions on the metaverse? Indeed, Meta's already lost over $10 billion in 2022 alone. Looking ahead, Meta CFO, Dave Wehner, said, he expected, "that Reality Labs operating losses in 2023 will grow significantly year-over-year."
Ouch!
I believe the open-source way can win out for the same reason it has in so many other fields. By enabling people to work together via the Linux Foundation-sponsored Open Metaverse Foundation, they can create an open metaverse that will enable everyone to play and profit from it. By enabling everyone to work with open hardware, open code, and open standards, the market pie will be larger for everyone.
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Speeding up queries 1000x by sorting my bitmaps
I'm working on a database system that stores and queries chess games and positions. Right now, it contains 240 million unique positions1 from 3.8 million games. One of the things it needs to do is quickly find all the games where a particular position occurs. I'd also like it to do things like find games where this position occurs and it ends in a draw.
Bitmaps are really useful here, and with some care they can achieve unbelievable efficiency. They can also be really slow if you're not careful. It's a journey.
We'll start by looking at how my bitmaps are implemented, and then we'll see how an assumption punished me severely and how I fixed it to make things a lot faster.
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Sources Of Complexity: Constraints
Complexity is bad. Simple software is better than complex software.
But software is complex for a reason. While people like coming up with grand theories of complexity (Simple Made Easy, No Silver Bullet) there’s very little info out there on the nitty-gritty specific sources of complexity. Without that, all the theories feel to me like the four elements theory. We just don’t have the data needed to come up with something more predictive. 1
I think a lot about the different sources of complexity. This article is about one particular source.
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Fixing html video playback on chrome
I do not often include videos on my blog, but when I do, I test to make sure they work. And to my dismay, these HTML5 videos could start, they could pause, but any time I attempted to seek the video playback position, it would fail.