Apache’s Rich Bowen explains the ‘Apache Way’
“Some projects that consider coming to the Apache Foundation see rigidity and they see that we are stuck in our ways and they don’t want to be part of that. And that’s fine – it’s certainly not the place for everyone,” Rich Bowen, Executive Vice President of the Apache Software Foundation tells me at the ApacheCon conference in Budapest. We are sitting in the lounge area at the Corinthia hotel where hundreds of coders, developers and data scientists have gathered for talks about Apache projects. Bowen is referring to the “Apache Way” which essentially means that for projects to come into the Foundation they need to abide by Apache’s principles of “community over code”, “meritocracy” and “openness”. And so far, you could say this approach has served the non-profit foundation well. Apache played a major part in the growth of the internet in the 1990s, becoming the dominant HTTP server. Today the open-source foundation has only five employees and the rest are volunteers. It has roughly 200 projects going and only survives on a budget of one million dollars a year, which is roughly 5k per project per year. Recent successes include Apache Tomcat and Hadoop. At his keynote, Bertrand Delecratz, Principal Scientist at Adobe, says a whopping “one billion emails are sent annually at Apache and the plan is to keep doing this for the next 50 years”. But what oddly makes Apache stand out is its steadfast adherence to its core principles rooted in tradition, in a world where, if you are not seen to be adapting and changing, then you may as well be on your way out. Apache must get a lot of criticism about being too rigid with its community guidelines? Bowen nods his head in agreement but says there is a reason for the way the Foundation works. He says it’s “not arbitrary”, and that decisions are made specifically “in order to make sure projects are sustainable”. “You look at a site like GitHub that has thousands of projects and then you actually start to look at the statistics and see that 75% of them are one person that’s just developing code. And that’s great, that is awesome. But it’s not something you want to build your business on. It’s not something you want to base a billion dollar company on.” “So Apache has developed this trust and that comes at a cost of a certain amount of slow-pace,” Bowen explains. But is there not a danger of losing out to projects just because they don’t agree with the ‘Apache Way’? “Yeah but you know those projects are still doing amazing things but just doing it somewhere else. I don’t feel like we missed out. We offer a particular service and not every project is the right one to take advantage of that. And that’s ok.” Bowen is very likeable and down-to-earth and clearly passionate about his work. He grew up in Kenya and when he later moved to the United States he set up his first website for Kenyans that “wanted a community” for discussion amidst turbulent political times. In the pre-Apache Foundation days, Bowen was at graduate school at the University of Kentucky and his first technical job was at printer company Lexmark, the ‘Lex’ referring to Lexington city in Kentucky,...
read moreFacebook moves beyond the ‘like’ button
Want to quickly react to a friend’s Facebook post about an accident or a sick relative but don’t want to hit the like button? windows 10 laptop Review: The best 13-inch laptops for Windows 10 Laptops and convertibles from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Microsoft square off in our Read Now Facebook may soon have another option for you. Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of Facebook, said in a town hall forum on Tuesday that the world’s largest social network is working on enabling uses to hit a button and express more than just a simple “like.” Company programmers are working on adding a dislike button and possibly other options and are getting close to launching a test. “People have asked about the dislike button for many years,” said Zuckerberg in response to what he said is a frequent question offering more than like option. “Today is the day we get to say we’re working on it and we’re very close to shipping a test of it.” However, Zuckerberg said he has been hesitant to offer a dislike button because he doesn’t want Facebook to turn into a mean-spirited forum. “It took us a while to get here because we didn’t want to just build a dislike button because we don’t want to turn Facebook into a forum where people are voting up or down on people’s posts,” he added. “That doesn’t seem like the kind of community we want to create. You don’t want to go through the process of sharing some kind of moment that was important to you in your day and then have someone down vote it. That isn’t what we’re here to build in the world.” This isn’t the first time Zuckerberg has voiced some hesitancy about adding a dislike option. Late in 2014, at another town hall event, Zuckerberg said he was concerned about the toxicity that a dislike button could spread on the social network. From what Zuckerberg said this week, what the company wants to do is give users a way to quickly show empathy, and that’s how Zuckerberg hopes the new button or buttons will be used. “Not every moment is a good moment,” he noted. “If you are sharing something that is sad, whether it’s something in current events, like the refugee crisis that touches you or if a family member passed away, then it may not feel comfortable to like that post but your friends and people want to express that they understand and relate to you. So I do think it’s important to give people more options than just like as a quick way to emote and share what you’re feeling on a post.” Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with ZK Research, said he likes the idea of adding more buttons to Facebook posts, but he’s not sure he likes the idea of a like button. “Right now the only option is like, so if a friend of mine is in an accident, I want to be able acknowledge it but not like it,” he added. “To me disliking is going to lead to popularity contests, bullying and stuff. Right now, I know kids talk a lot about “my post had 35 likes and Sarah’s only had 10.” Now add in dislikes and you have a mess.”...
read moreWhat might surprise CIOs in Autumn 2015?
Most of the long-term trends for CIOs remain pretty consistent year after year. But in case there was anything worth remaining particularly vigilant for in the run up to Christmas, we asked a group of industry insiders the direct question: “What might surprise CIOs in Autumn 2015?” The rise of machine learning Alessandro Perilli, GM of Cloud Management at Red Hat This Autumn, CIOs might be surprised by a wave of new companies and solutions based on Machine Learning technologies. The progress made by the human kind in understanding how the brain learns and predicts, and how to replicate that behaviour through artificial intelligence, has been enormous in last few years. I believe we are about to see machine learning algorithms solving old problems in a completely new and dramatically more accurate way, from incident management to adaptive web design. A truly disruptive digital assistant Rorie Devine Interim CTO/Growth Hacker of Team CXO We hope and expect an iPhone 6S running iOS 9 will launch in September. An iPhone 7 announcement would be a surprise. The big change/opportunity for app developers we get might be Siri attempting to become your proactive digital assistant. If they nail it I’m sure it will be the start of a much enriched experience, but they have to avoid launching some sort of mobile Microsoft Clippy. The new EU Data Protection law David Juitt, chief security architect at Ipswitch New EU Data Protection law, the General Data Protection Regulation will be a surprise for many. In a recent survey of IT Professionals on their attitudes towards the new regulation, we discovered that almost one fifth of respondents still have no idea whether it will impact their business, despite citing that they do store and process personal data. The new regulation is designed to align data protection law across EU member countries and is due to be passed as law in late 2015. Non-compliance will result in severe penalties… so a surprise with a sting in its tail. The security threats CIOs miss Dr Guy Bunker, SVP at Clearswift Firstly, the number of phishing/malware kits are increasing – enabling less sophisticated threat actors to carry out increasingly sophisticated attacks. Some of the groups of people who are increasingly using this are extremists and people with grudges. For these groups it is not necessarily about stealing information for financial gain, but instead for reputational damage and disruption. Sony, last year, was a good example of this. CIOs should look at where these types of attack can occur and how they can best mitigate the risk. Secondly, beware of a more sustained attack – imagine that your customer database is compromised… but instead of the contents being stolen, it is slowly corrupted. Every week, one digit on 5% of the telephone numbers changes… or a letter is changed from their name… or their title is changed… Would you know? What would you do? CIOs should prepare for more of these damaging but harder to spot attacks Cloud security problems never go away Gareth Johnson, CEO of Crayon UK What might surprise some CIOs is that despite all the work they’ve done to protect assets and future-proof businesses by moving IT estates to a hybrid cloud environment, there are still significant risks being posed by staff storing data...
read moreApple releases iOS 9 as early download attempts fail
Apple released iOS 9 today at 1 p.m. ET, but in the first hour users reported that they were unable to grab the 1GB download. “Software Update Failed,” the message read on iPhones and iPads. “An error occurred downloading iOS 9.” Computerworld confirmed the problem, initially seeing it on multiple iOS 8 devices. But after several subsequent attempts, the download successfully started about an hour after Apple issued the upgrade. iOS 9 download problem Some users, including Computerworld staffers, saw this message during the first hour or so of iOS 9’s availability. Similar reports of early problems were posted on Apple’s own support forums and elsewhere on the Internet. “Not a very helpful error,” wrote someone identified as “yanic” on the former. Others countered with snark. “Strangely, this is not a ‘limited time offer,’ said “stedman 1” on the same thread, likely referring to Microsoft’s Windows 10 free upgrade offer, which is valid for one year. “The software will be available tomorrow, and the next day, and next week.” Some advice ended up being more helpful. “You are facing an overloaded server which is pretty typical of the first day a software revision comes out,” contended “Ralph Landry1” on a different discussion thread. Several iPhone owners who had said that they were unable to download iOS 9 returned to the same forum threads to report they had gotten the upgrade later. windows 10 laptop Review: The best 13-inch laptops for Windows 10 Laptops and convertibles from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Microsoft square off in our Read Now Apple’s track record with iOS releases has been mixed. Last year’s iOS 8 roll-out seemingly started off smoothly — there were few initial complaints about getting the upgrade — but many soon griped that 8’s large size forced them to wipe apps and content from their devices before they could install the new OS. iOS 9’s size and the free space requirements for installation were both reduced to address that problem of last year. The free space demand for iOS 9 fell to 1.3GB to 1.8GB from last year’s 4.5GB to 5GB. Apple also botched the iOS 8.0.1 update a week after iOS 8’s original release, and was forced to pull it from its servers almost as soon as it was posted because of a bug that crippled cellular connections to the then-new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. iOS 9, which will be pre-loaded on the new iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus that Apple will start selling on Sept. 25, is a free upgrade for owners of the iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPhone 5C, iPhone 5S, iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus; iPad 2, the third- and fourth-generation iPads with Retina screens, the iPad Air and Air 2, the iPad Mini, and the iPad Mini 2 and 3 with Retina; and the fifth-generation iPod Touch. Apple introduced iOS 9 at its annual developers conference in June, when CEO Tim Cook and other executives highlighted new features — particularly for the latest iPad — and a more intelligent Siri assistant. Today, Computerworld reviewer Michael deAgonia concluded that iOS 9, although primarily a performance and stability upgrade, was “a clear winner” for newer iOS devices and surprisingly fluid on older iPhones. “iPad users, especially those with newer iPads, should consider...
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