news
Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Standards Leftovers
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Education
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Michal Zalewski ☛ “The Secret Life of Circuits” is here
I try to keep marketing in check: I’ve been working on my latest book for more than a year but only posted about it once. At the time, the book was still going through layout and editing, so I didn’t expect many subscribers to pull the trigger. But now, I’m happy to report that the book is actually, physically here — and is lookin’ good: [...]
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GNU Projects
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GNU ☛ pspp @ Savannah: PSPP 2.1.2 has been released.
I'm very pleased to announce the release of a new version of GNU PSPP. PSPP is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data. It is a free replacement for the proprietary program SPSS. Changes from 2.1.1 to 2.1.2: [...]
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Data
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Jerry Orr ☛ Data is never impartial
It’s a refreshingly honest admission that everything you read has someone’s perspectives embedded in it, no matter how carefully they may (or may not) try to remain neutral. It is impossible to entirely disassociate our experiences from what we write.
Thoreau could probably never have imagined the kind of data we can collect with 21st-century technology, but his caution is just as applicable today. Even raw datasets reflects the perspectives of the people who choose to collect it.
Data is never impartial. Several decisions go into every piece of raw data we see. Consider something as seemingly straightforward as application server logs.
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Standards/Consortia
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US Library of Congress ☛ AV1 Image File Format (AVIF)
One of the major advantages of AVIF is its capacity for compression with impacting image quality. According to Cloudinary's AVIF Format: A Next-Gen Image Format to Rule them All?, "in many cases, AVIF files can be up to 50% smaller than equivalent JPEG files while maintaining the same level of visual fidelity."
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