today's leftovers
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The Register UK ☛ Analyst warns of Microsoft Power Apps license hike
A blog post from analyst Directions on Microsoft stated this week that organizations building applications in the Power Apps environment would in some cases have to switch users from the Power Apps license to the Dynamics 365 Enterprise license at ten times the cost.
Andrew Snodgrass points out that under previous rules, users licensed with Power Apps subscriptions could access data in Dynamics 365 applications – a suite of enterprise apps from Microsoft including CRM, ERP, and HR – by reading data, so long as they did not modify data in "restricted" tables.
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Chip Huyen ☛ What I learned from looking at 900 most popular open source AI tools
Four years ago, I did an analysis of the open source ML ecosystem. Since then, the landscape has changed, so I revisited the topic. This time, I focused exclusively on the stack around foundation models.
The full list of open source AI repos is hosted at llama-police. The list is updated every 6 hours.
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The Register UK ☛ Citrix reportedly doubles cost of some software licenses
Citrix has allegedly made major changes to its partner program, and one of the consultancies briefed on the new arrangements told The Register that the when the news was delivered to a gathering of the Citrix faithful the result was "stunned silence followed by anger and disbelief."
One reason for that reaction is a change to licensing for partners that, we understand, will see Citrix charge double the price for its wares unless partners pay upfront for a year.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Hackaday ☛ Hackaday Podcast Episode 262: Wheelchair Hacking, Big Little Science At Home, Arya Talks PCBs
Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they go over their favorite hacks and stories from the past week. This episode starts off with an update on Hackaday Europe 2024, which is now less than a month away, and from there dives into wheelchairs with subscription plans, using classic woodworking techniques to improve your 3D printer’s slicer, and a compendium of building systems. You’ll hear about tools for finding patterns in hex dumps, a lusciously documented gadget for sniffing utility meters, a rare connector that works with both HDMI and DisplayPort, and a low-stress shortwave radio kit with an eye-watering price tag. Finally, they’ll take a close look at a pair of articles that promise to up your KiCAD game.
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#025 | S2 | Cybershow Radio | Disappearing Worlds
The crew discuss things that are being displaced by digital technology, and what that means for society, democracy and governance.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla ☛ Larissa May reflects on empowering the next generation’s relationship with technology
At Mozilla, we know we can’t create a better future alone, that is why each year we will be highlighting the work of 25 digital leaders using technology to amplify voices, effect change, and build new technologies globally through our Rise 25 Awards. These storytellers, innovators, activists, advocates, builders and artists are helping make the internet more diverse, ethical, responsible and inclusive.
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Mozilla ☛ Introducing Didthis: A New App For Hobbyists
Everyone has a hobby. More generally, everyone has things they’re interested in or passionate about. And pursuing those interests is one of the big reasons that we use the Web. The online world is a great place to connect with our fellow hobbyists and enthusiasts, to learn from them, and to share our own knowledge and accomplishments.
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Standards/Consortia
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The Register UK ☛ W3C's Robin Berjon on InterPlanetary File System tech
But IPFS is just a technology, not a predatory financial gambit. It is a set of peer-to-peer protocols for finding content on a decentralized network. It relies on a Content Identifier (CID) rather than a location (URL), which means the focus is on the identity of the content (a hash) rather than a server where it's stored.
IPFS focuses on representing and addressing data, routing it, and transferring it. It's not a storage service, though storage is necessary to use it. It's been adopted by Cloudflare and implemented in Brave and Opera, among others, and work is being done to make it work in Chromium.
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APNIC ☛ NTP Pool: The Internet timekeeper
Modern humans rely on the stability of caesium atoms to deliver atomic precision time. Atomic clocks provide the time signal, and time information is propagated to computers and other devices using the Network Time Protocol (NTP) on the Internet (there is also the issue of how to synchronize atomic clocks, which is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, but let us not get sidetracked).
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ACM ☛ Deep Dive into NTP Pool's Popularity and Mapping
Time synchronization is of paramount importance on the Internet, with the Network Time Protocol (NTP) serving as the primary synchronization protocol. The NTP Pool, a volunteer-driven initiative launched two decades ago, facilitates connections between clients and NTP servers. Our analysis of root DNS queries reveals that the NTP Pool has consistently been the most popular time service. We further investigate the DNS component (GeoDNS) of the NTP Pool, which is responsible for mapping clients to servers. Our findings indicate that the current algorithm is heavily skewed, leading to the emergence of time monopolies for entire countries. For instance, clients in the US are served by 551 NTP servers, while clients in Cameroon and Nigeria are served by only one and two servers, respectively, out of the 4k+ servers available in the NTP Pool. We examine the underlying assumption behind GeoDNS for these mappings and discover that time servers located far away can still provide accurate clock time information to clients. We have shared our findings with the NTP Pool operators, who acknowledge them and plan to revise their algorithm to enhance security.
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Open Access/Content
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New Statesman ☛ Why we should open source the law
It is rare for so much to be achievable with such a modest reform. Merely moving the recording and official reporting of legal cases from a small private organisation to a national one would open up England’s unique advantages in legal tech.
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Education
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Archipylago ☛ archipylago #3: Good-enough SRE practices & Rule-based systems in Python
Our third event of the year was a meetup hosted at Taiste's wonderful and cozy office. It's always a good day when it's meetup day. We had a lovely group of developers gather together at the meetup and a nice split of familiar faces from the Turku meetup scene and first-time participants.
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