IBM Tells U.S. Employees to Return to Office in September

LaMoreaux didn’t specify whether employees would be allowed to work remotely after the September office openings. “IBM has long-established practices and policies supporting work life balance, which will continue as we return to the office,” she wrote. Most of IBM’s U.S. employees have been working remotely since the start of the pandemic with offices open on a limited basis.

IBM tells U.S. employees they will return to the office in September

Fully vaccinated employees will be allowed to work in the office without masks.

Connect Quarkus applications with Drogue IoT and LoRaWAN | Red Hat Developer

The goal of the Drogue IoT project is to make it easy to connect devices and cloud-based applications with each other. In this article, we'll show how to implement firmware based on Drogue Device that can communicate with Quarkus applications in the cloud using the low-power LoRaWAN protocol.

What’s new with Red Hat Co.Lab

As we head into the second half of 2021, it’s a good moment to share a few updates on our latest Co.Lab activities and how, even remotely, we’re still bringing STEM education to students. What’s new you might ask? It’s the evolution. We’re continuing the evolution that began last year out of necessity brought on by the pandemic. What started as in-person events focused on one group of students, has shifted to encompass virtual learning workshops, self-service options that empower individuals to run their own workshops and kits that bring the experience home. No matter where a student lives or the situation they are in, they can benefit from the program and have the opportunity to learn.

In case you need a refresher, Co.Lab, presented by Open Source Stories, is a learning experience that introduces young students to the power of collaboration, community and open source. Using open hardware and open source methodologies, Red Hat mentors teach students why being open is a better way to work together and a more effective way to solve problems. Since its launch in 2017, Co.Lab primarily existed as in-person events that shared the principles of open source and collaboration with more than 700 middle school students in 12 countries.

5G, industry, and collaboration at the edge

As a U.S. West Coast transplant living in New England, I’ve enjoyed my time exploring the mountains of New Hampshire. Though relatively small compared with other ranges around the globe, The White Mountains (as they’re called) are nonetheless impressive for their distinct topography and resilience amid terrible weather conditions.

The highest peak—Mount Washington at 6,288 feet—is home to the "world’s worst weather." For over 60 years, in fact, the mountain claimed the world record for fastest wind gust ever recorded: an astounding 231 miles per hour captured in 1934.

It is in this environment that the technologist in me can’t help but consider the possibilities of edge computing in remote parts of the world, where big datacenter footprints and always-on connectivity are not typically found.

Davie Street Enterprises transforms its applications with Red Hat

Like many long-standing companies, our fictional company Davie Street Enterprises (DSE) recognizes that its way of doing business must change. As outlined in a previous post, business today is done through processes that have been built at the company's inception, along with the tools that support those processes.

In this post, we will examine a major business process and the software tools that support it. Daniel Mitchell, the Chief Architect at DSE, will be leading this effort, addressing critical decisions(like build or buy) to support a successful transformation.

Digital transformation: 5 tips to keep pace with your customers | The Enterprisers Project

With the global pandemic happening during a period of rapid digitalization, two forces of disruption coalesced. Businesses need to pivot as consumers have become more connected, workplaces have been restructured, and logistical challenges must be overcome.

The use of technology has been a key differentiator in how well companies have adapted to the change. That's one reason why, according to IDC research, global spending on digital transformation products and services continued to grow in 2020.

But bridging what our company calls the digital gap - which arises when consumer behavior evolves faster than most businesses evolve – requires more than just new technology. Here are five pieces of advice on how to outpace change and become a catalyst for transformation at your company.

Call for Code app uses AI to make homes safer and more resilient

Disasters can hit with little warning, but often it’s not the earthquakes or windstorms that directly harm people, it’s the failure of substandard housing that causes the most devastation. The World Bank reports that by 2030 nearly 3 billion people will be at risk of losing a loved one or their homes to disasters such as these. However, a machine learning solution that emerged from Call for Code to help builders, local officials, and homeowners assess construction quality before and after storms might change all that.

Developers from Build Change, an organization dedicated to preventing housing loss caused by disasters, placed second in the 2018 Call for Code Global Challenge with their solution PD3R (Post-Disaster Rapid Response Retrofit). Their solution provided families with the ability to immediately assess whether their home could be structurally strengthened following an earthquake. The team received an award of $25,000 USD, and now The Linux Foundation will host an offshoot of the technology as an open source project.

New Open Source Project Uses Machine Learning to Inform Quality Assurance for Construction in Emerging Nations

New Open Source Project Uses Machine Learning to Inform Quality Assurance for Construction in Emerging Nations

Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced it will host the Intelligent Supervision Assistant for Construction (ISAC-SIMO) project, which was created by Build Change with a grant from IBM as part of the Call for Code initiative. The Autodesk Foundation, a Build Change funder, also contributed pro-bono expertise to advise the project’s development.

Build Change helps save lives in earthquakes and windstorms. Its mission is to prevent housing loss caused by disasters by transforming the systems that regulate, finance, build and improve houses around the world.

ISAC-SIMO packages important construction quality assurance checks into a convenient mobile app. The tool harnesses the power of machine learning and image processing to provide feedback on specific construction elements such as masonry walls and reinforced concrete columns. Users can choose a building element check and upload a photo from the site to receive a quick assessment.

Growing pains for Fedora CoreOS

In mid-May, Dusty Mabe posted an announcement that the stable stream of Fedora CoreOS was being updated to Fedora 34. In it, he noted a few caveats (e.g. "systemd-resolved is still enabled but not used yet [1]"), some recently added features, and some new features that are coming soon. All pretty normal stuff except that Fedora 34 was released at the end of April and Mabe's post showed that Fedora CoreOS has not really kept up.

In fact, as Tomasz Torcz pointed out, the systemd-resolved change was made for Fedora 33, while an upcoming feature ("Move to cgroup v2 by default [5]") was originally made for Fedora 31, which was released in October 2019. That seems to indicate that Fedora CoreOS is lagging the main distribution, which may cause confusion for users, he said. "Should Fedora CoreOS use the same version number while not containing all the changes from main Fedora Linux?"

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Neal Gompa said that Verna's response was "a cop-out and a bad answer". The problem, he said, is that the Fedora CoreOS (or FCOS as he and others abbreviate it) working group has historically not participated in the development of Fedora, and the Changes process in particular. Instead of adapting to the feature changes made for Fedora, FCOS generally just rolls them back, "which has frustrated pretty much everyone". Beyond that, it is not just FCOS that needs to have solid upgrades; breaking upgrades for Fedora are not acceptable either, Gompa said.

But Verna believes that the working group is actually participating in the process. He pointed to four GitHub issues tracking changes for Fedora 32-35 (e.g. for Fedora 32 and for Fedora 35) that were (or need to be) incorporated into FCOS. Vít Ondruch replied that most or all of that work is not visible within the rest of Fedora, though. Verna agreed and suggested that the working group should be more vocal on mailing lists and the like.

Fedora Community Blog: Community Blog monthly update: May 2021

This is the latest in our monthly series summarizing the past month on the Community Blog. Please leave a comment below to let me know what you think.

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In May, we published 27 posts. The site had 4,601 visits from 2,382 unique viewers. 744 visits came from search engines, while468 came from Twitter and 134 from the WordPress Android app.