Oracle has begun making a new version of Solaris 11.4 available for free/open-source developers and for non-production personal use. Phoronix reports: Solaris 11.4 CBE is the "Common Build Environment" and intended for open-source developers and strictly non-production personal use... That is if you want Solaris for new installs in 2022. The new Solaris 11.4 "CBE" spin is effectively a rolling release and from Oracle's perspective hopes to ease the integration of the open-source software relied upon by Solaris rather than being bound to the dated 11.4.0 GA release.

Downloading the new Solaris 11.4 CBE does require an Oracle account. The CBE builds are also described as "similar to a beta, they are pre-release builds of a particular SRU." The non-production use license is put out under the Oracle Technology Network Early Adopter License Agreement for Oracle Solaris. Oracle will allow upgrading from these free CBE releases to paid SRU releases under Oracle support contracts. More details for those interested in Oracle Solaris 11.4 CBE via the Oracle Solaris blog.

Developer burnout is helping to drive an exodus of software developer talent from organizations, as part of a larger trend known as the Great Resignation, according to a report released on April 13 by MuleSoft, which is a division of Salesforce. From a report: The MuleSoft report was based on research conducted by Vanson Bourne in February 2022 across the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, and Australia. Eighty-six percent of respondents indicated that in the last two years it has become increasingly difficult to recruit software developers. One of the reasons why is the larger macroeconomic trend of the Great Resignation, where employees are leaving their employers en masse during the COVID-19 pandemic as they seek a better work-life balance.

Burnout is also a large challenge for developers, according to the report. The top causes of developer burnout are increasing workloads and the challenges of learning new skills to adapt to emerging technologies. "The pandemic was a massive accelerator for the need of digital tools," Matt McLarty, global field CTO and vice president of the Digital Transformation Office (DTO) at MuleSoft, told ITPro Today. "Non-technology companies were ultimately forced to become technology companies overnight, and we saw nearly every organization require developers to help them achieve these new goals on high-pressure deadlines, all at once."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from XDA Developers: Google will start highlighting reputable developers and publishers with a special badge. Google wrote in an email to Chrome Web Store developers on Friday, "we're happy to announce two new extension badges to help us deliver on that goal: the Featured badge and the Established publisher badge. Both of these badges will appear in the store in the next few weeks. Developers who earn these badges may receive higher rankings in search and filtering, and may also see their extensions appear in special promotions both on and off Chrome Web Store." "Developers who earn these badges may receive higher rankings in search and filtering"

The first is a Featured badge, which "will be granted to extensions that follow our technical best practices and meet a high standard of user experience and design." This badge is given to extensions manually by the Chrome Web Store team, so there isn't a full (public) list of guidelines, but the email mentioned a clear store listing page and following best practices as some of the criteria. The Established publisher badge will be granted automatically to developers and publisher accounts that have been verified and "established a consistent positive track record with Google services and compliance with the Developer Program Policy." In other words, most developers that haven't broke Chrome Web Store rules will probably get the badge at some point.

Google says publishers will not be able to pay money for either badge, but the company is working on ways for developers to request consideration. Starting on April 20, developers will be able to nominate their own extensions for a Featured badge.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Tech-backed Code.org reports that as part of efforts to provide scaled human-centered education, the Stanford AI Lab analyzed 711,274 solutions to interactive block-based Code.org programming assignments submitted by 3rd and 4th grade students to develop AI-based solutions for automatically grading student homework. The research project received funding from LinkedIn founder and VC Reid Hoffman, who is coincidentally a $1+ million supporter of Code.org, which provided the student data.

Autograding systems are increasingly being deployed at all levels of education to meet the challenge of teaching programming at scale. So, will AI make Computer Science grader and undergraduate teaching assistant jobs obsolete?

"Enabling developer productivity has become a key vector in every organization's success," writes Matt Asay at InfoWorld — not a nice-to-have feature but a must-have.

"Which is why, perhaps ironically, the best way to set your developers free may actually be to fetter their freedom." The more developers mattered, the more everyone wanted to cater to their needs with new software tools, new open source projects, new cloud services, etc. This meant lots of new developer choice and associated freedom, but that wasn't necessarily an unalloyed good. As RedMonk analyst Steven O'Grady noted in 2017, "The good news is that this developer-driven fragmentation has yielded an incredible array of open source software. The bad news is that, even for developers, managing this fragmentation is challenging."

Can one have too much choice? Yep.

It's long been known in consumer retail, for example, that when there is too much choice, "consumers are less likely to buy anything at all, and if they do buy, they are less satisfied with their selection." Turns out this isn't just a matter of breakfast cereals or clothing. It also applies to developers building enterprise software. InfoWorld's Scott Carey writes that "complexity is killing software developers." He's right. But what can be done?

In a conversation with Weaveworks CEO Alexis Richardson, he related how self-service development platforms are reemerging to help developers make sense of all that open source and cloud choice. By giving developers "a standard, pre-approved environment in which the effort to create an app from an idea is minimal," he explained, it allows them to "focus on innovation not plumbing."
"Done right, a little bit of constraint goes a long way..." Asay argues, touting the benefits of PaaS (platform as a service) self-service development platforms. ("Enterprises that want to give their developers the freedom the cloud affords can couple it with just enough constraint to make that freedom useful....")

Asay argues that "However you approach it, the point is to stop thinking about freedom and control as impossibly opposed. Smart enterprises are figuring out ways to enable their developers using self-service platforms. Maybe you should, too."

Apple, looking to address criticism of its competitive practices by the European Union, developers and U.S. lawmakers, pointed to a report showing that third-party apps are thriving on the iPhone and other devices. From a report: In a study published by Analysis Group and touted by the iPhone maker, analysts said that Apple's own apps are infrequently the dominant option and only account for a small share of app usage. "We found that Apple's own apps, while used by many, are rarely the most popular of a given type and are eclipsed in popularity by third-party apps for nearly every country and app type we considered," the report said. In the U.S., the report found that Spotify is 1.6 times more popular than Apple Music, that Google Maps is used 1.5 times more than Apple Maps, and that Netflix is 17 times more popular than Apple's service. The Amazon Kindle service, meanwhile, was 4.5 times more popular than Apple's Books app.

The C programming language has many problems. But now the Registers notes that "Aria Beingessner, a member of the teams that implemented both Rust and Swift, has an interesting take... That C isn't a programming language anymore...."

"And it hasn't been for a long time," Beingessner writes in an online essay: This isn't about the fact that C is actually horribly ill-defined due to a billion implementations or its completely failed integer hierarchy. That stuff sucks, but on its own that wouldn't be my problem.

My problem is that C was elevated to a role of prestige and power, its reign so absolute and eternal that it has completely distorted the way we speak to each other. Rust and Swift cannot simply speak their native and comfortable tongues — they must instead wrap themselves in a grotesque simulacra of C's skin and make their flesh undulate in the same ways it does....

Everyone had to learn to speak C to talk to the major operating systems, and then when it came time to talk to eachother we suddenly all already spoke C so... why not talk to eachother in terms of C too?

Oops! Now C is the lingua franca of programming.

Oops! Now C isn't just a programming language, it's a protocol.
The Register picks up the argument: it's fair (if wildly controversial) to say, as this 2018 Association for Computing Machinery paper puts it, that C is not a low-level programming language. As its subtitle says: "Your computer is not a fast PDP-11."

This is not a relative assessment: that is, it's not saying that there are other programming languages that are lower-level than C. It's an absolute one: C is often praised for being "close to the metal," for being a "portable assembly language." It was, once, but it hasn't been since the 1970s; the underlying computational models of modern computers are nothing like the one that C represents, which was designed for a 1970s 16-bit minicomputer.
The Register summarizes what happens when a language has to interface with an operating system — and thus, that operating system's C code. [I]t has to call C APIs. This is done via Foreign Function Interfaces (FFIs).... In other words, even if you never write any code in C, you have to handle C variables, match C data structures and layouts, link to C functions by name with their symbols....

The real problem is that C was never designed or intended to be an Interface Definition Language, and it isn't very good at it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: With Russian gamers effectively cut off from purchases on most major gaming platforms due to corporate sanctions against the country, the Russian game developer behind indie darling Loop Hero is encouraging Russian customers to pirate the game. In a Sunday post on Russian social network VK (Google translated version), Loop Hero developer Four Quarters said, "In such difficult times, we can only help everyone to raise the pirate flag (together with vpn)" to get the game. The developer then included a link to a copy of Loop Hero on a popular Russian torrent tracker to aid in that process directly.

In a follow-up post the next day (Google translated version), Four Quarters insisted that "we didn't do anything special, there's nothing wrong with torrents." The company also notes that players wanting to offer the developer donations in lieu of buying the game should refrain. "The truth is that everything is fine with us, send this support to your family and friends at this difficult time," they wrote.

While players outside of Russia should still be able to purchase Loop Hero on Steam, Valve said earlier this month that banking issues prevented it from sending payments to developers in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine (ironically enough). Valve recently told PC Gamer that developers in these countries will have to provide "intermediary banking information" in a foreign country to receive the payments they're due. "It's a very frustrating situation, and we hope to find the resolution soon," Valve wrote in a note to affected developers. Russia is reportedly considering legalizing software piracy to combat the sanctions imposed on the country for its invasion of Ukraine.

Alphabet's Google was fined 2 million euros ($2.2 million) by the Paris Commercial Court over abusive practices toward developers on its app store. From a report: The U.S. tech giant will also have to change seven clauses from its contracts dating back to years 2015 and 2016, that included a 30% commission on revenues generated by developers on the Google Play Store, according to a text of Monday's ruling. Google, as well as Apple, were taken to court in 2018 by the French Ministry of Finance, for imposing a "significant imbalance in the rights and obligations" concerning app developers, including the right for Google to unilaterally modify or terminate the contracts.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For years, players have complained that ballooning game download sizes are clogging up hard drives and Internet bandwidth. In a recent interview with streamer TeeP, Call of Duty: Warzone Live Operations Lead Josh Bridge admitted that the game's massive file size is also impacting the team's ability to release new maps. Asked about the possibility of adding the original Verdansk map to cycle alongside the game's current Caldera map, Bridge said, "We want that. We all want that," before addressing the "technical problem" that makes it difficult: "The install and re-install sizes are fucking insane, right? If we pulled out Caldera and say we're gonna drop in Verdansk, this could be essentially re-downloading, like, the size of Warzone," he said. "And every time we've done that, we lose players," Bridge continued. "Because you're kind of like, 'I don't want to re-download that,' [so you] uninstall. I think you can't fit anything else but Warzone on a base PS4."

Bridge is exaggerating, but only a little. Activision says you need a whopping 175GB of hard drive space on PC for a Warzone install. On Xbox, the base download is listed at nearly 92GB, similar to the size on PlayStation systems. Adding Modern Warfare onto the Warzone package increases the total size to about 250GB on PC and 150GB on consoles. About a year ago, Activision announced that the "larger than usual" Warzone "Season 2 Reloaded" patch would reduce the game's "overall footprint" on hard drives by 10-15GB (and 30-35GB when combined with Modern Warfare, depending on the platform). The "data optimization and streamlining" in that update would also ensure that "future patch sizes for Modern Warfare and Warzone [would] be smaller" than the 57GB update being offered at that point.

The results over the ensuing year have been mixed. A February Season 2 patch required only about 11GB of file downloads, for instance, while a December 7 update that introduced new maps required a 41-45 GB download on consoles. [...] In any case, Bridge was remarkably frank about Warzone's file size issues and said that "looking to the future, we're putting a lot more effort into how we sort that out on a technical level so that we can have that [map] rotation. We've been really looking at it, so we'll have more to talk about that, but that is ultimately a goal to ensure that there's a freshness and a variety of experiences."

"Pong on a Commodore 64 is one thing... but Pong in a single C64 sprite? That's uncharted territory," writes Slashdot reader segaboy81.

Neowin reports: The Commodore 64 is an iconic machine. For many of us boomers, it was our introduction to programming... Josip Retro Bits is a YouTube channel that specializes in fun challenges on old hardware like the Commodore 64. In an older video, Josip creates a game of Pong using Basic. On the surface, this doesn't sound very interesting, but it's a real challenge because Basic is very limited when compared to writing machine code. Basically, the C64 is perfectly capable of a game like Pong, but not really in Basic. Spoiler alert: he does it. However, a commenter on that video had a novel idea. How about creating an entire game of Pong in a single spite?
That's a 24 x 21 pixels object. ("It can be seen as a bigger programmable character that can be moved on hardware on steps of one pixel," explains one tech blog.) And another spoiler alert: he does it again.

Here's the repository for the "Tiny Pong" code. It's written in C, with functions like drawScreen() and batSound().

And about 18 minutes into the video, he not only plays a game of Pong inside the sprite — he simultaneously makes that sprite move around the screen like the ball in a game of Pong.

Google announced on Wednesday that it would test letting Android developers use their own billing systems in their apps, the first step in what could lead to a dramatic reshaping of the app economy. However, Epic Games, which has been a strong proponent for opening app marketplaces and sued Google after the search giant removed Fortnite from Google Play for including direct payments, still isn't happy. From a report: It plans to continue advocating for an app ecosystem that offers more choices, according to a statement the company shared with The Verge. "Apple and Google continue to abuse their market power with policies that stifle innovation, inflate prices and reduce consumer choice," Corie Wright, Epic's VP of public policy, said in the statement. "One deal does not change the anticompetitive status quo. We will continue to fight for fair and open platforms for all developers and consumers and work with policymakers and regulators to hold these gatekeepers accountable for their anticompetitive conduct."

GitHub has introduced a new feed into the dashboard of users and it doesn't appear to have gone down well with the code shack's regulars. The Register reports: As soon as the new feed arrived, replete with all kinds of exciting suggestions for developers to look at, the complaints began rolling in as users worried the recommendations were turning GitHub into something distressingly like a social media platform. "I do not need to see recommendations, nor activity of people I don't follow," said one user. "Don't fix what's not broken." Others were blunter, stating: "I don't want algorithmic feed" and requesting a feed on stuff that actually mattered â" issues, releases, PRs and so on. GitHub pushed out a new beta version of its Home Feed earlier this week, with the avowed intention of developers reaching a wider audience and building communities. The plan is to make discovery easier and help users "find new repositories or users to follow based on your interests."

As if to demonstrate the levels of discontent around GitHub's new feature, a Chrome extension quickly showed up to disable the social feed by removing the "For You" section on the GitHub dashboard. Not all users were upset by the appearance of the new feed, and GitHub staff popped up to promise that there would be an option to make one's profile private and opt out of pretty much everything via a single setting. It will, however, take until late April before this option is likely to appear, they said. Which prompted the obvious question: "Why is this opt-out instead of opt-in?"

Mozilla today launched MDN Plus, a paid subscription product on top of the existing (and recently re-designed) Mozilla Developer Network (MDN), one of the web's most popular destinations for finding documentation and code samples related to web technologies like CSS, HTML and JavaScript. From a report: The new subscription offering will introduce features like notifications, collections (think lists of articles you want to save) and MDN offline for when you want to access MDN when you're not online. There will be three subscription tiers: MDN core, a free limited version of the paid plans; MDN Plus 5, with access to notifications, collections and MDN offline for $5 per month or $50 per year; and MDN Supporter 10 for those who are willing to pay a bit more to support the platform in addition to getting a direct feedback channel to the MDN team (as well as "pride and joy," Mozila says). As the name implies, that more expensive plan will cost $10 a month or $100 for an annual subscription.

An anonymous reader shares an opinion piece: Protest is an important element of free speech that should be protected. Openness and inclusivity are cornerstones of the culture of open source, and the tools of open source communities are designed for global access and participation. Collectively, the very culture and tooling of open source -- issue tracking, messaging systems, repositories -- offer a unique signaling channel that may route around censorship imposed by tyrants to hold their power.

Instead of malware, a better approach to free expression would be to use messages in commit logs to send anti-propaganda messages and to issue trackers to share accurate news inside Russia of what is really happening in Ukraine at the hands of the Russian military, to cite two obvious possibilities. There are so many outlets for open source communities to be creative without harming everyone who happens to load the update.

We encourage community members to use both the freedoms and tools of open source innovatively and wisely to inform Russian citizens about the reality of the harm imposed on Ukrainian citizens and to support humanitarian and relief efforts in and supportive of Ukraine. Longer term, it's likely these weaponizations are like spitting into the wind: The downsides of vandalizing open source projects far outweigh any possible benefit, and the blowback will ultimately damage the projects and contributors responsible. By extension, all of open source is harmed. Use your power, yes -- but use it wisely.

Amid increasing global regulations over app stores and their commission structures, Google today announced the launch of a pilot program designed to explore what it calls "user billing choice." From a report: The program will allow a small number of participating developers, starting with Spotify, to offer an additional third-party billing option next to Google Play's own billing system in their apps. While Google already offers a similar system in South Korea following the arrival of new legislation requiring it, this will be the first time it will test the system in global markets.

As the debut pilot partner, Spotify will introduce both their own billing system alongside Google Play's own when the pilot goes live. Google did not say which other developers it has lined up for future tests, but noted Spotify was a "natural first partner" on the effort given its reach as one of the "world's largest subscription developers with a global footprint" and its "integrations across a wide range of device form factors." Spotify, of course, has also been one of the larger developers to push for regulatory changes to app stores' existing billing systems, having testified before Congress on the matter, joined lobbying groups, and backed app store legislation, including the Open Markets Act, that would require companies like Apple and Google to permit alternatives to existing app stores.

Quanta magazine describes an "explosion of interest" in what they're calling algorithms with predictions, arguing that machine learning tools "have, in a real way, rejuvenated research into basic algorithms." Machine learning and traditional algorithms are "two substantially different ways of computing, and algorithms with predictions is a way to bridge the two," said Piotr Indyk, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It's a way to combine these two quite different threads...." In the past few years, researchers have shown how to incorporate algorithms with predictions into scheduling algorithms, chip design and DNA-sequence searches.

In addition to performance gains, the field also advances an approach to computer science that's growing in popularity: making algorithms more efficient by designing them for typical uses.... By ignoring the worst-case scenarios, researchers can design algorithms tailored to the situations they'll likely encounter. For example, while databases currently treat all data equally, algorithms with predictions could lead to databases that structure their data storage based on their contents and uses....

[M]ost of these new structures only incorporate a single machine learning element. Tim Kraska, a computer scientist at MIT, imagines an entire system built up from several separate pieces, each of which relies on algorithms with predictions and whose interactions are regulated by prediction-enhanced components.

"Taking advantage of that will impact a lot of different areas," Kraska said.

Slashdot reader mmanciop reminded us that Ubuntu released a new version of its "circle of friends" logo this week (which its designer says gives it "a more contemporary look and feel.")

From the Ubuntu blog: We proudly present to you the transformation of the Circle of Friends logo for Ubuntu. The new logo isn't a revolution; rather, it's an evolution of the Circle of Friends. As you can see at the top of the post, the classic white-on-orange colour scheme hasn't changed. But the new version sports sleek lines which bind the Circle of Friends even more closely together.

While it is important to have a respectful continuity with the previous Circle of Friends, the updated version is leaner, more focused, more sophisticated. It also makes a little more sense that the heads are now inside the circle, facing each other and connecting more directly. The rectangular orange tag is a break from the conventional square or circle, as it allows for the boldness of the orange to express itself and provides a recognisable colourful mark across media. Finally, the logo moves from a tiny superscript to a large, dynamic and leading presence.

Some might wonder why we had to touch the Ubuntu logo at all. As one can imagine, it is a daunting honour to work on something so many of us have such a strong connection to. But in the end, a logo should match what it represents. Similar to how Ubuntu continues to evolve and adapt to new uses in technology, its logo should follow suit to encapsulate and reflect such ongoing change.
For comparison, here's the original logo.

Share your reactions in the comments. (For example, how do you think it compares to other logos?) Do you like it more or less than, say, the logo for Raku?

An anonymous Slashdot reader summarizes some important news from the web page of Jason Donenfeld (creator of the open-source VPN protocol WireGuard): The Linux kernel's random number generator has seen its first set of major improvements in over a decade, improving everything from the cryptography to the interface used. Not only does it finally retire SHA-1 in favor of BLAKE2s [in Linux kernel 5.17], but it also at long last unites '/dev/random' and '/dev/urandom' [in the upcoming Linux kernel 5.18], finally ending years of Slashdot banter and debate:

The most significant outward-facing change is that /dev/random and /dev/urandom are now exactly the same thing, with no differences between them at all, thanks to their unification in random: block in /dev/urandom. This removes a significant age-old crypto footgun, already accomplished by other operating systems eons ago. [...] The upshot is that every Internet message board disagreement on /dev/random versus /dev/urandom has now been resolved by making everybody simultaneously right! Now, for the first time, these are both the right choice to make, in addition to getrandom(0); they all return the same bytes with the same semantics. There are only right choices.
Phoronix adds: One exciting change to also note is the getrandom() system call may be a hell of a lot faster with the new kernel. The getrandom() call for obtaining random bytes is yielding much faster performance with the latest code in development. Intel's kernel test robot is seeing an 8450% improvement with the stress-ng getrandom() benchmark. Yes, an 8450% improvement.

"Supporting generics has been Go's most often requested feature, and we're proud to deliver the generic support that the majority of users need today," the Go blog announced this week. *

It's part of what Go's development team is calling the "biggest change ever to the language".

SiliconANGLE writes that "Right out of the gate, Go 1.18 is getting a CPU speed performance boost of up to 20% for Apple M1, ARM64 and PowerPC64 chips. This is all from an expansion of Go 1.17's calling conventions for the application binary interface on these processor architectures."

And Go 1.18 also introduces native support for fuzz testing — the first major programming language to do so, writes ZDNet: As Google explains, fuzz testing or 'fuzzing' is a means of testing the vulnerability of a piece of software by throwing arbitrary or invalid data at it to expose bugs and unknown errors. This adds an additional layer of security to Go's code that will keep it protected as its functionality evolves — crucial as attacks on software continue to escalate both in frequency and complexity. "At Google we are committed to securing the online infrastructure and applications the world depends upon," said Eric Brewer, VIP infrastructure at Google....

While other languages support fuzzing, Go is the first major programming language to incorporate it into its core toolchain, meaning — unlike other languages — third-party support integrations aren't required.
Google is emphasizing Go's security features — and its widespread adoption. ZDNet writes: Google created Go in 2007 and was designed specifically to help software engineers build secure, open-source enterprise applications for modern, multi-core computing systems. More than three-quarters of Cloud Native Computing Foundation projects, including Kubernetes and Istio, are written in Go, says Google. [Also Docker and Etc.] According to data from Stack Overflow, some 10% of developers are writing in Go worldwide, and there are signs that more recruiters are seeking out Go coders in their search for tech talent..... "Although we have a dedicated Go team at Google, we welcome a significant amount of contributions from our community. It's a shared effort, and with their updates we're helping our community achieve Go's long-term vision.
Or, as the Go blog says: We want to thank every Go user who filed a bug, sent in a change, wrote a tutorial, or helped in any way to make Go 1.18 a reality. We couldn't do it without you. Thank you.

Enjoy Go 1.18!
* Supporting generics "includes major — but fully backward-compatible — changes to the language," explains the release notes. Although it adds a few cautionary notes: These new language changes required a large amount of new code that has not had significant testing in production settings. That will only happen as more people write and use generic code. We believe that this feature is well implemented and high quality. However, unlike most aspects of Go, we can't back up that belief with real world experience. Therefore, while we encourage the use of generics where it makes sense, please use appropriate caution when deploying generic code in production.

While we believe that the new language features are well designed and clearly specified, it is possible that we have made mistakes.... it is possible that there will be code using generics that will work with the 1.18 release but break in later releases. We do not plan or expect to make any such change. However, breaking 1.18 programs in future releases may become necessary for reasons that we cannot today foresee. We will minimize any such breakage as much as possible, but we can't guarantee that the breakage will be zero.