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Submission + - Is Agile Development a Failing Concept? (dice.com) 1

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Many development teams have embraced Agile as the ideal method for software development, relying on cross-functional teams and adaptive planning to see their product through to the finish line. Agile has its roots in the Agile Manifesto, the product of 17 software developers coming together in 2001 to talk over development methods. And now one of those developers, Andy Hunt, has taken to his blog to argue that Agile has some serious issues. Specifically, Hunt thinks a lot of developers out there simply aren’t adaptable and curious enough to enact Agile in its ideal form. 'Agile methods ask practitioners to think, and frankly, that’s a hard sell,' Hunt wrote. 'It is far more comfortable to simply follow what rules are given and claim you’re ‘doing it by the book.’' The blog posting offers a way to power out of the rut, however, and it centers on a method that Hunt refers to as GROWS, or Growing Real-World Oriented Working Systems. In broad strokes, GROWS sounds a lot like Agile in its most fundamental form; presumably Hunt’s future postings, which promise to go into more detail, will show how it differs. If Hunt wants the new model to catch on, he may face something of an uphill battle, given Agile’s popularity.

Submission + - RTFM? How to write a manual worth reading (opensource.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Definition: RTFM (Read The F'ing Manual). Occasionally it is ironically rendered as Read The Fine Manual, a phrase uttered at people who have asked a question that we, the enlightened, feel is beneath our dignity to answer, but not beneath our dignity to use as an opportunity to squish a newbie's ego.

Have you noticed that the more frequently a particular open source community tells you to RTFM, the worse the FM is likely to be? I've been contemplating this for years, and have concluded that this is because patience and empathy are the basis of good documentation, much as they are the basis for being a decent person.

Submission + - Red Hat takes a stand against container fragmentation. With standards (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Iamthecheese
Iamthecheese writes: With Docker, kubernetes, and a little help, Red Hat wants to reform software containers.

How much standardization should happen here? Obviously some coughslackwarecoughcough distros avoid as much change as possible, which precludes package standardization. Others try to fit themselves to a universal standard whenever possible, even if it departs from traditional philosophies. What about your favorite distro? Will you be pushing to support this?

Submission + - Google Confirms Cops Can Wiretap Your Hangouts (vice.com)

Submitted by Errorcod3
Errorcod3 writes: In the wake of all the Edward Snowden revelations, a seemingly endless series of encryption apps, all promising some degree “NSA-proof” security, have come out trying to take advantage of this new anti-surveillance business opportunity.

But despite some apps’ relative success, the reality is that most people probably just use mainstream messaging apps like iMessage or Google Hangouts.

Apple has long maintained that conversations over iMessage and Facetime use end-to-end encryption, meaning “no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them,” as the company said after the PRISM revelations. That claim has turned out to be partly true: normally, Apple can’t read your iMessages, but they can if they really want to.

Submission + - Is IT work getting more stressful, or is it the Millennials? (computerworld.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: A survey of IT professionals that has been conducted in each of the last four years is showing an increase in IT work stress levels. It's a small survey, just over 200 IT workers, and it doesn't account for the age of the respondents. But some are asking whether Millennials, those ages 18 to 34, are pushing up stress levels either as IT workers or end users. The reason Millennials may be less able to handle stress is that they interact with others in person far less than other generations do, since most of their social interactions have been through Internet-based, arms-length contact, said Billie Blair, who holds a doctorate in organizational psychology. This generation has also been protected from many real-life situations by their parents, "so the workplace tends to be more stressful for them than for others," she said. Others are wondering if Millennials are more demanding of IT workers. Millennials are also expert users, and "are no longer in awe of technology specialists and therefore demand higher service levels," said Mitch Ellis, managing director of executive search firm Sanford Rose Associates in St. Louis.

Comment Re:Who says it succeeded? (Score 1) 469

by Gazzonyx (#49635883) Attached to: Why Was Linux the Kernel That Succeeded?
So far as I know, by default, Linux still over allocates up to 50% of total RAM (not 50% of available memory if you count virtual memory). This parameter can be tuned or set via sysctl. But, yeah, I love Linux, but it's got memory management issues that I don't have on other operating systems. I've found I can usually tune around them somewhat.

Although I've never found a way to have it do what I'd really like and dedicate lots of memory for buffers when writing large files. For instance, when I'm writing a disk image via dd to a reasonably fast RAID array and I've got 32 GB of RAM, I wish I could tell the kernel to not waste the RAM caching the pages I'm writing (they'll be evacuated when memory exhausts, and if I decide to compress the image, the 'end' of the file that's cached will be evacuated to make room for the stuff I've compressed), but rather to dedicate them to the buffer so that once the disk I'm reading is at the slow end of the disk, my RAID array isn't just sitting idle waiting on IO.

Comment Re:Who says it succeeded? (Score 1) 469

by Gazzonyx (#49635845) Attached to: Why Was Linux the Kernel That Succeeded?

What you describe /is/ swapping, which makes it odd since you started with "if you are not using swap". Care to elaborate on what exactly you did, under what circumstances?

My description is accurate. I have just been normally using the computer. Even without any swap, the HDD goes "krrrrrr..." and the system becomes very unresponsive when you begin to run out of memory. You can easily try it yourself, as it is reproducible every time.

It seems to throw out program pages from memory if it knows that they are disk-backed. It seems to be hard to trigger the OOM killer in this condition as well, even though it should happen.

I believe these memory problems can be somewhat mitigated by some hand tuning of the vm parameters "swappiness" and "vfs_cache_pressure". Unfortunately I don't have the time at the moment to setup a good test, but they're worth a shot if you find yourself in that situation in the future. Ref: https://www.suse.com/documenta...

Submission + - Let's help make Krita "faster than Photoshop" (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by xophos
xophos writes: The Krita foundation, makers of the open source paint program Krita has started a Kickstarter campaign to make it even more awesome. Main goals for this years campaign are drawing speed on high resolution canvasses with large brushes, and the long planned animation feature.

Submission + - Putting keys in freezer could prevent car break-ins (wcnc.com) 1

Submitted by turkeydance
turkeydance writes: If you have a car with a hands-free key fob, you could become the target of a break-in tactic that you probably didn't know was possible. AAA Carolinas' Dave Yelverton says this type of key fob typically unlocks a car if it's within about 30 centimeters.

"Your car is continually trying to reach out and touch this key," Yelverton said. "And when it finds the key, you can open the door without touching the car without using the key. You can just leave it in your pocket."

But there are break-in cases across the country, where a power amplifier device may have been used to unlock the cars. Yelverton says the amplifier would take that signal from the car and fire it out as far as 100 meters.

Submission + - Mysterious X-rays at the center of the galaxy

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The x-ray space telescope NuSTAR has detected high energy x-rays at the center of the Milky Way coming from no obvious source.

In and of themselves, X-rays from the galactic center aren't unusual. But the X-rays NuSTAR detects don't seem to be associated with structures already known to exist. For example, a supernova remnant named Sgr A East emits low-energy X-rays but not high-energy X-rays. The high-energy blotch doesn't correlate with structures seen in radio images either, such as the dust and gas clouds of Sgr A West that are falling toward the supermassive black hole.

Instead, Perez and her colleagues propose that thousands of stellar corpses could be responsible for the high-energy X-rays: massive (and still-growing) white dwarfs, spun-up pulsars, or black holes or neutrons stars feeding on low-mass companion stars.

All of their proposed solutions, however, have serious problems explaining all of the data.

Submission + - Report: Microsoft Considering Salesforce Acquisition (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Bloomberg reports that Microsoft is considering making a bid for CRM and cloud software company Salesforce, after hearing that Salesforce was entertaining an offer from another company. No talks are underway, but Salesforce has started working with investment banks to figure out how it wants to respond to such offers. Salesforce has a market value of about $50 billion, so any sort of acquisition would be a huge business deal.

Submission + - Google Can't Ignore The Android Update Problem Any Longer (tomshardware.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An editorial at Tom's Hardware makes the case that Google's Android fragmentation problem has gotten too big to ignore any longer. Android 5.0 Lollipop and its successor 5.1 have seen very low adoption rates — 9.0% and 0.7% respectively. Almost 40% of users are still on KitKat. 6% lag far behind on Gingerbread and Froyo. The article points out that even Microsoft is now making efforts to both streamline Windows upgrades and adapt Android (and iOS) apps to run on Windows. If Google doesn't adapt, "it risks having users (slowly but surely) switch to more secure platforms that do give them updates in a timely manner. And if users want those platforms, OEMs will have no choice but to switch to them too, leaving Google with less and less Android adoption." The author also says OEMs and carriers can no longer be trusted to handle operating system updates, because they've proven themselves quite incapable of doing so in a reasonable manner.

Submission + - Rombertik strikes! In 10 seconds, this computer will self-destruct (betanews.com)

Submitted by Mark Wilson
Mark Wilson writes: Viruses can be a serious problem and they take myriad forms. Viruses have become increasingly sophisticated over the years, particularly in the methods used to try to evade detection. Now Cisco's Talos security researchers have discovered the Rombertik which goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid analysis.

Researchers managed to reverse-engineer the virus and found "multiple layers of obfuscation and anti-analysis functionality". One sample was found to include code that would destroy the MBR of the host computer if analysis or debugging is attempted.

The effects of a Rombertik can be devastating. Left to its own devices, the malware will sit happily in the background gathering information about online activity, collecting user credentials and feed them back to a remote server. Writing on the Cisco blog, Ben Baker and Alex Chiu explain that while Rombertik's method of propagation — usually through emails and social networks — is nothing out of the ordinary, the way it operates is something from a different league.

Submission + - Why Was Linux The Kernel That Succeeded? (thevarguy.com) 2

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: One of the most puzzling questions about the history of free and open source software is this: Why did Linux succeed so spectacularly, whereas similar attempts to build a free or open source, Unix-like operating system kernel met with considerably less success? Christopher Tozzi has rounded up some theories, focusing specifically on kernels, not complete operating systems. These theories take a detailed look at the decentralized development structure, pragmatic approach to things, and the rich developer community, all of which worked in favor of Linux.

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