today's leftovers
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Tom's Guide ☛ How to benchmark your CPU on Windows, macOS or Linux
Understanding how to benchmark your CPU on Windows 11, macOS or Linux is crucial for evaluating and maximizing your system's performance.
A CPU (central processing unit) is the brains of your PC, and is essentially the primary controller of everything that it does. A benchmark will assess your CPU's processing power, speed, and efficiency, and having this information aids in optimizing settings for enhanced productivity and gaming.
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Qemu ☛ Qemu Advent Calendar 2023: A bespoke system for managing a particularly fast home internet connection, which grew into much more.
Size of download is 180M bytes.
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Qemu ☛ Qemu Advent Calendar 2023: Another bootsector game from Oscar Toledo, day 7 is a game where you move a paddle to control the ball and eliminate bricks.
Size of download is 1.5K bytes.
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Open Access/Content
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Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Where Did the Open Access Movement Go Wrong?: An Interview with Richard Poynder
Richard Poynder has long been one of the most respected and insightful commentators on the scholarly communication ecosystem, and in particular on the development and progress of the open access (OA) movement – to which he has always been a friend, but one admirably willing to speak truth even when the truth was uncomfortable or inconvenient. Recently he announced that he has decided the OA movement has failed, and that he is turning his attention to other topics and issues. I invited him to sit for an email interview to discuss his thinking and conclusions.
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Walled Culture ☛ Another reason why diamond open access is best: no economic barriers to publishing rebuttals
Rebuttal articles are a vital part of the scientific publishing process, since they help weed out mistakes made by other researchers, usually honest errors, but sometimes not. As the Web Ecology editorial notes, writing rebuttal articles is hard enough because of their necessarily confrontational nature. But anyone wanting to publish rebuttals in open access titles that are funded through article processing charges (APCs), generally paid by the researcher’s academic institution, has to contend with an additional problem. In this case, as well as writing cogent explanations why published research is faulty, people who wish to publish a rebuttal must generally pay an APC to do so. The Web Ecology editorial gives details of a particular case where several scientists spent considerable time and effort rebutting an article in the open access journal Ecosphere, about spiders that allegedly preyed on bats: [...]
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EU Cyber Resilience Act
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Dolphin Publications B V ☛ Cyber Resilience Act: manufacturers responsible for open-source code
The content is also reassuring for the open-source community. Europe will hold manufacturers responsible for making products more secure. If this manufacturer starts working with open-source code in a product, this code becomes part of the product for which the manufacturer is responsible. This is made clear through an important specification about who must comply with the law. Any development that takes place outside the goal of commercialization will now be allowed to ignore the rules. Open-source developers often cannot respond as quickly to a security incident as a company acting from commercial interests.
Manufacturers may, therefore, continue to shop the open-source community for software. This is common, by the way: “Open-source software represents more than 70 percent of the software present in products with digital elements in Europe.” This statement comes from an open letter that several open-source organizations sent to the Commission earlier this year to express their concerns. But where manufacturers could previously choose to adopt the code in its entirety, security controls will now be required.
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Euractive ☛ EU institutions finalise agreement on cybersecurity law for connected product
As Euractiv anticipated, the agreement was largely pre-cooked at the technical level, with many aspects of the proposal being endorsed during the political meeting. However, EU negotiators settled the last political hurdles after some intense discussions.
[...]
Another negotiation point is dealing with open-source software integrated into commercial products. Here, an agreement was reached at the technical level and endorsed at the political level.
As Euractiv previously reported, the idea was to cover only software developed in the context of commercial activities and to have more limited rules for open-source software stewards regarding documentation and vulnerability handling.
In the final iteration of the text, seen by Euractiv, non-profit organisations that sell open source software on the market but reinvest all the revenues in non-for-profit activities were also excluded from the scope.
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Openwashing
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Unicorn Media ☛ OwnCloud Dropbox Alternative Merges With Proprietary Kiteworks
The open-source Dropbox alternative, ownCloud, is folding into Kiteworks, a similar but proprietary Dropbox alternative focused on security. Also included in the merger is Dracoon, yet another proprietary Dropbox alternative. Both ownCloud and Dracoon are based in Germany, while Kiteworks is headquartered in Silicon Valley, although it also started life in Germany.
Although press releases were issued by all three entities on November 21, they were all short on details, with both Jonathan Yaron, Kikeworks’ chairperson and CEO, and Tobias Gerlinger, CEO and managing director at ownCloud, painting a picture indicating that everything will be exactly the same after the merger, only better — which might be easier said than done.
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The open source energy infrastructure stack strengthens [Ed: Adrian Bridgwater continues to serve as openwashing parrot of LF]
There’s the Linux Foundation, that body that we all know and respect to act as stewards of the Linux kernel and champion the use of open source technologies first and foremost for their efficiency as well as their (cost & programmatic) effectiveness. Then there’s LF Energy, that part of the Linux Foundation that is dedicated to solving climate change through open frameworks, reference architectures and a support ecosystem of complementary projects.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Raspberry Pi ☛ Impressions from Coolest Projects South Africa 2023
Our team and some of our partners attended the Coolest Projects South Africa 2023 event in Cape Town to meet young tech creators and help out as project judges.
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