O'Reilly's "Tech Trends" newsletter included an interesting item this month: Want your own Klein Bottle? Made by Cliff Stoll, author of the cybersecurity classic The Cuckoo's Egg, who will autograph your bottle for you (and may include other surprises).
First described in 1882 by the mathematician Felix Klein, a Klein bottle (like a Mobius strip) has a one-side surface. ("Need a zero-volume bottle...?" asks Stoll's web site. "Want the ultimate in non-orientability...? A mathematician's delight, handcrafted in glass.")

But how the legendary cyberbreach detective started the company is explained in this 2016 article from a U.C. Berkeley alumni magazine. Its headline? "How a Berkeley Eccentric Beat the Russians — and Then Made Useless, Wondrous Objects." The reward for his cloak-and-dagger wizardry? A certificate of appreciation from the CIA, which is stashed somewhere in his attic... Stoll published a best-selling book, The Cuckoo's Egg, about his investigation. PBS followed it with a NOVA episode entitled "The KGB, the Computer, and Me," a docudrama starring Stoll playing himself and stepping through the "fourth wall" to double as narrator. Stoll had stepped through another wall, as well, into the numinous realm of fame, as the burgeoning tech world went wild with adulation... He was more famous than he ever could have dreamed, and he hated it. "After a few months, you realize how thin fame is, and how shallow. I'm not a software jockey; I'm an astronomer. But all people cared about was my computing."

Stoll's disenchantment also arose from what he perceived as the false religion of the Internet... Stoll articulated his disenchantment in his next book, Silicon Snake Oil, published in 1995, which urged readers to get out from behind their computer screens and get a life. "I was asking what I thought were reasonable questions: Is the electronic classroom an improvement? Does a computer help a student learn? Yes, but what it teaches you is to go to the computer whenever you have a question, rather than relying on yourself. Suppose I was an evil person and wanted to eliminate the curiosity of children. Give the kid a diet of Google, and pretty soon the child learns that every question he has is answered instantly. The coolest thing about being human is to learn, but you don't learn things by looking it up; you learn by figuring it out." It was not a popular message in the rise of the dot-com era, as Stoll soon learned...

Being a Voice in the Wilderness doesn't pay well, however, and by this time Stoll had taken his own advice and gotten a life; namely, marrying and having two children. So he looked around for a way to make some money. That ushered in his third — and current — career as President and Chief Bottle Washer of the aforementioned Acme Klein Bottle company... At first, Stoll had a hard time finding someone to make Klein bottles. He tried a bong peddler on Telegraph Avenue, but the guy took Cliff's money and disappeared. "I realized that the trouble with bong makers is that they're also bong users."

Then in 1994, two friends of his, Tom Adams and George Chittenden, opened a shop in West Berkeley that made glassware for science labs. "They needed help with their computer program and wanted to pay me," Stoll recalls. "I said, 'Nah, let's make Klein bottles instead.' And that's how Acme Klein Bottles was born."
UPDATE: Turns out Stoll is also a long-time Slashdot reader, and shared comments this weekend on everything from watching the eclipse to his VIP parking pass for CIA headquarters and "this CIA guy's rubber-stamp collection."

"I am honored by the attention and kindness of fellow nerds and online friends," Stoll added Saturday. "When I first started on that chase in 1986, I had no idea wrhere it would lead me... To all my friends: May you burdens be light and your purpose high. Stay curious!"

He specified the JSON notation, and developed tools like JSLint and the minifier JSMin. His Wikipedia entry says he was also a senior JavaScript architect at PayPal — but he's probably better known for writing O'Reilly's book JavaScript: the Good Parts.

But Doug Crockford has a new challenge. O'Reilly's monthly tech newsletter says Crockford "has created a new programming language called Misty. It is designed to be used both by students and professional programmers."

The language's official site calls it "a dynamic, general-purpose, transitional, actor language. It has a gentle syntax that is intended to benefit students, as well as advanced features such as capability security and lambdas with lexical scoping..." The language is quite strict in its use of spaces and indentation. In most programming languages, code spacing and formatting are underspecified, which leads to many incompatible conventions of style, some promoting bug formation, and all promoting time-wasting arguments, incompatibilities, and hurt feelings. Misty instead allows only one convention which is strictly enforced. This liberates programmers to focus their attention on more important matters.

Indentation is in increments of 4 spaces. The McKeeman Form is extended by three special rules to make this possible:


indentation
The spaces required by the current nesting.

increase_indentation
Append four spaces to the indentation.

decrease_indentation
Remove four spaces from the indentation.


The indentation is the number of spaces required at the beginning of a line as determined by its nesting level.


indent
increase_indentation linebreak

outdent
decrease_indentation linebreak


The linebreak rule allows the insertion of a comment, ends the line, and checks the indentation of the next line. Multiple comments and blank lines may appear wherever a line can end.

"Focus on the horse race and the flashy news and you'll miss the real stories," argues Mike Loukides, the content strategy VP at O'Reilly Media. So instead he shares trends observed on O'Reilly's learning platform in the first nine months of 2021: While new technologies may appear on the scene suddenly, the long, slow process of making things that work rarely attracts as much attention. We start with an explosion of fantastic achievements that seem like science fiction — imagine, GPT-3 can write stories! — but that burst of activity is followed by the process of putting that science fiction into production, of turning it into real products that work reliably, consistently, and fairly. AI is making that transition now; we can see it in our data. But what other transitions are in progress...?

Important signals often appear in technologies that have been fairly stable. For example, interest in security, after being steady for a few years, has suddenly jumped up, partly due to some spectacular ransomware attacks. What's important for us isn't the newsworthy attacks but the concomitant surge of interest in security practices — in protecting personal and corporate assets against criminal attackers. That surge is belated but healthy.... Usage of content about ransomware has almost tripled (270% increase). Content about privacy is up 90%; threat modeling is up 58%; identity is up 50%; application security is up 45%; malware is up 34%; and zero trust is up 23%. Safety of the supply chain isn't yet appearing as a security topic, but usage of content about supply chain management has seen a healthy 30% increase....

Another important sign is that usage of content about compliance and governance was significantly up (30% and 35%, respectively). This kind of content is frequently a hard sell to a technical audience, but that may be changing.... This increase points to a growing sense that the technology industry has gotten a regulatory free ride and that free ride is coming to an end. Whether it's stockholders, users, or government agencies who demand accountability, enterprises will be held accountable. Our data shows that they're getting the message.

According to a study by UC Berkeley's School of Information, cybersecurity salaries have crept slightly ahead of programmer salaries in most states, suggesting increased demand for security professionals. And an increase in demand suggests the need for training materials to prepare people to supply that demand. We saw that play out on our platform....

C++ has grown significantly (13%) in the past year, with usage that is roughly twice C's. (Usage of content about C is essentially flat, down 3%.) We know that C++ dominates game programming, but we suspect that it's also coming to dominate embedded systems, which is really just a more formal way to say "internet of things." We also suspect (but don't know) that C++ is becoming more widely used to develop microservices. On the other hand, while C has traditionally been the language of tool developers (all of the Unix and Linux utilities are written in C), that role may have moved on to newer languages like Go and Rust. Go and Rust continue to grow. Usage of content about Go is up 23% since last year, and Rust is up 31%. This growth continues a trend that we noticed last year, when Go was up 16% and Rust was up 94%....

Both Rust and Go are here to stay. Rust reflects significantly new ways of thinking about memory management and concurrency. And in addition to providing a clean and relatively simple model for concurrency, Go represents a turn from languages that have become increasingly complex with every new release.
Other highlights from their report:

• "Quantum computing remains a topic of interest. Units viewed is still small, but year-over-year growth is 39%. That's not bad for a technology that, honestly, hasn't been invented yet...."

• "Whether it's the future of finance or history's biggest Ponzi scheme, use of content about cryptocurrency is up 271%, with content about the cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Ethereum (ether) up 166% and 185% respectively...."

• "Use of JavaScript content on our platform is surprisingly low — though use of content on TypeScript (a version of JavaScript with optional static typing) is up.... Even with 19% growth, TypeScript has a ways to go before it catches up; TypeScript content usage is roughly a quarter of JavaScript's..."

• "Python, Java, and JavaScript are still the leaders, with Java up 4%, Python down 6%, and JavaScript down 3%...."

• "Finally, look at the units viewed for Linux: it's second only to Kubernetes. While down very slightly in 2021, we don't believe that's significant. Linux has long been the most widely used server operating system, and it's not ceding that top spot soon."

"If I worked in tech antitrust policy, I would really want to understand why all the cases against Microsoft 20 years ago were such an unqualified failure." That's what venture capitalist Benedict Evans (formerly an Andreessen Horowitz partner), is asking regulators on Twitter.

"You won, yet achieved nothing, and then Microsoft's dominance went away anyway. Why?"

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes the thread of reminiscent reactions from Microsoft employees prompted this response on the blog of software developer Dave Winer "to lament the collateral damage of a winner-take-all mentality." "Microsoft could've played a senior role, and helped the rest of us add all kinds of editors and databases to the web, and at least try to bring across some of the GUI innovations of the 1980s. Instead all that was lost. Today, decades later, because of the chaos Microsoft brought us then, the editors on the web still suck. They are really inferior. Far less useful than the editors we had before the web.

"What if Microsoft had chilled and brought together the best minds from the PC era and asked some basic questions like how are we going to make the web better for everyone, at least as good as what we had before. What a time that would have been to do just that. But they acted like spoiled children."
But are we facing the same issues today? In The End of Silicon Valley as We Know It?, geek publishing icon/seed investor Tim O'Reilly checks in on tech's latter-day missed opportunities: The extractive behavior the tech giants exhibit has been the norm for modern capitalism since Milton Friedman set its objective function in 1970: "The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits"...

It's a sad time for Silicon Valley, because we are seeing not only the death of its youthful idealism but a missed opportunity. Paul Cohen, the former DARPA program manager for AI, made a powerful statement a few years ago at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences that we both attended: "The opportunity of AI is to help humans model and manage complex interacting systems." That statement sums up so much of the potential that is squandered when firms like Google, Amazon, and Facebook fall prey to the Friedman doctrine rather than setting more ambitious goals for their algorithms.

I'm not talking about future breakthroughs in AI so much as I'm talking about the fundamental advances in market coordination that the internet gatekeepers have demonstrated. These powers can be used to better model and manage complex interacting systems for the good of all. Too often, though, they have been made subservient to the old extractive paradigm."

O'Reilly media's Vice President of Content Strategy (also the coauthor of Unix Power Tools) recently explored why several popular programming languages wound up on the "most dreaded" list in StackOverflow's annual developer survey: There's no surprise that VBA is #1 disliked language. I'll admit to complete ignorance on Objective C (#2), which I've never had any reason to play with. Although I'm a Perl-hater from way back, I'm surprised that Perl is so widely disliked (#3), but some wounds never heal. It will be interesting to see what happens after Perl 7 has been out for a few years. Assembly (#4) is an acquired taste (and isn't a single language)...
But he eventually suggests that both C and Java might be on the list simply because they have millions of users, citing a quote from C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup: "there are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses." Dislike of a language may be "guilt by association": dislike of a large, antiquated codebase with minimal documentation, and an architectural style in which every bug fixed breaks something else. Therefore, it's not surprising to see languages that used to be widely used but have fallen from popularity on the list... Java has been the language people love to hate since its birth. I was at the USENIX session in which James Gosling first spoke about Java (way before 1.0), and people left the room talking about how horrible Java was — none of whom had actually used the language because it hadn't been released yet...

If there's one language on this list that's associated with gigantic projects, it's Java. And there are a lot of things to dislike about it — though a lot of them have to do with bad habits that grew up around Java, rather than the language itself. If you find yourself abusing design patterns, step back and look at what you're doing; making everything into a design pattern is a sign that you didn't understand what patterns are really for... If you start writing a FactoryFactoryFactory, stop and take a nice long walk. If you're writing a ClassWithAReallyLongNameBecauseThatsHowWeDoIt, you don't need to. Java doesn't make you do that... I've found Java easier to read and understand than most other languages, in part because it's so explicit — and most good programmers realize that they spend more time reading others' code than writing their own.
He also notes that Python only rose to #23 on the "most dreaded" languages list, speculating developers may appreciation its lack of curly braces, good libraries, and Jupyter notebooks. "Python wins the award for the most popular language to inspire minimal dislike. It's got a balanced set of features that make it ideal for small projects, and good for large ones."

"And what shall we say about JavaScript, sixteenth on the list? I've got nothing. It's a language that grew in a random and disordered way, and that programmers eventually learned could be powerful and productive... A language that's as widely used as JavaScript, and that's only 16th on the list of most dreaded languages, is certainly doing something right. But I don't have to like it."

Tim O'Reilly is the founder of O'Reilly Media (formerly O'Reilly & Associates), and is credited by Wikipedia as helping to popularize the term open source. But Techcrunch reveals what he's learned about venture capital from his work with Bryce Roberts (O'Reilly's investing partner at early-stage venture firm O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures).

"At a minimum, O'Reilly — who bootstrapped his own company, O'Reilly Media, 42 years ago and says it now produces 'a couple hundred million dollars in revenue' yearly — provides a lot of food for thought." Tim O'Reilly: The typical VC model is looking for this high-growth company with exit potential, because it's looking for this big financial return from an IPO or acquisition, and that selects for a certain type of founder. My partner Bryce decided two funds ago [to] look for companies that are kind of disparaged as lifestyle companies that are trying to build sustainable businesses with cash flow and profits. They're the kind of small businesses, and small business entrepreneurs, that have vanished from America, partly because of the VC myth, which is really about creating financial instruments for the wealthy...

The talent pool is just much greater [when you look outside of Silicon Valley]. There's a certain kind of bro culture in Silicon Valley and if you don't fit in, sure [you could find a way], but there are a lot of impediments... I've been really disillusioned with Silicon Valley investing for a long time. It reminds me of Wall Street going up to 2008. The idea was, "As long as someone wants to buy this [collateralized debt obligation], we're good." Nobody is thinking about: Is this a good product...?

It's part of the structural inequality in our society, where we're building businesses that are optimized for their financial return rather than their return to society.

Alan Cohen is a software and systems engineer/manager, and a lifelong technophile who's been engaged in developing medical devices and other high-reliability products. So right now he's working with the new Massachusetts-based "Mass General Brigham Center for COVID Innovation" to refine an emergency ventilator prototype — and then mass-produce thousands of them.

"Most of what's needed is the expertise to turn prototypes into products," Alan says — and fortunately, he'd already written a book about that for O'Reilly Media. "He's asked that it be freely shared with others to help solve problems in this time of crisis," reads a new announcement at OReilly.com.

Alan is also occamboy (Slashdot reader #583,175), and shares his thoughts with Slashdot readers. He starts by saying that he's "psyched" that O'Reilly's now agreed to offer free downloads of Prototype to Product, "to help teams developing products in response to COVID-19." It's a high-level cross-functional engineering look at how... well, how prototypes are developed into manufacturable products. Covers electronics, software, mechanicals, manufacturing, project management, regulatory, and so forth. Currently at 4.8 stars on Amazon, and only two of the reviews were by friends of mine :).
Alan also offers this special hint for Slashdot's quick-learning readers.

"Figure 1-1 is all you really need to know, the rest is details."

"Machines will need to make ethical decisions, and we will be responsible for those decisions," argues Mike Loukides, O'Reilly Media's vice president of content strategy: We are surrounded by systems that make ethical decisions: systems approving loans, trading stocks, forwarding news articles, recommending jail sentences, and much more. They act for us or against us, but almost always without our consent or even our knowledge. In recent articles, I've suggested the ethics of artificial intelligence itself needs to be automated. But my suggestion ignores the reality that ethics has already been automated... The sheer number of decisions that need to be made means that we can't expect humans to make those decisions. Every time data moves from one site to another, from one context to another, from one intent to another, there is an action that requires some kind of ethical decision...

Ethical problems arise when a company's interest in profit comes before the interests of the users. We see this all the time: in recommendations designed to maximize ad revenue via "engagement"; in recommendations that steer customers to Amazon's own products, rather than other products on their platform. The customer's interest must always come before the company's. That applies to recommendations in a news feed or on a shopping site, but also how the customer's data is used and where it's shipped. Facebook believes deeply that "bringing the world closer together" is a social good but, as Mary Gray said on Twitter, when we say that something is a "social good," we need to ask: "good for whom?" Good for advertisers? Stockholders? Or for the people who are being brought together? The answers aren't all the same, and depend deeply on who's connected and how....

It's time to start building the systems that will truly assist us to manage our data.
The article argues that spam filters provide a surprisingly good set of first design principles. They work in the background without interfering with users, but always allow users to revoke their decisions, and proactively seek out user input in ambiguous or unclear situations.

But in the real world beyond our inboxes, "machines are already making ethical decisions, and often doing so badly. Spam detection is the exception, not the rule."

Reader schwit1 shares a report: When you're browsing online, who sets the prices? An algorithm, most likely. A study from 2015 showed that a third of all items on Amazon [PDF] had prices set by an algorithm, and chances are that percentage has only risen. A new study shows how easy it would be for price-setting algorithms to learn to collude with each other and keep prices at a disadvantage for customers.

This sort of collusion would stem from a certain type of algorithm, the researchers say. Reinforcement algorithms learn through trial and error. In the simplest terms, a walking robot would take a step, fall, and try again. These algorithms have often been used to teach algorithms to win games like Go.

"From the antitrust standpoint," say professors Emilio Calvano, Giacomo Calzolari, and others from the University of Bologna in Italy, "the concern is that these autonomous pricing algorithms may independently discover that if they are to make the highest possible profit, they should avoid price wars. That is, they may learn to collude even if they have not been specifically instructed to do so, and even if they do not communicate with one another."

Tim O'Reilly, publisher of geeky books, "seizes on this singular moment in history" for a futuristic new book of his own, according to this interview with Steven Levy. An anonymous reader writes: When it comes to artificial intelligence, O'Reilly sees a reason for optimism in the fact that we're already discussing biased algorithms. ("We had plenty of bias before but we couldn't see it.") O'Reilly ultimately believes AI won't take away our jobs, and even argues that we're defining it all wrong. "What we now call AI is just the next stage of us weaving our intelligence together into a greater whole. If you think about the internet as weaving all of us together, transmitting ideas, in some sense an AI might be the equivalent of a multi-cellular being and we're its microbiome, as opposed to the idea that an AI will be like the golem or the Frankenstein. If that's the case, the systems we are building today, like Google and Facebook and financial markets, are really more important than the fake ethics of worrying about some far future AI.

"We tend to be afraid of new technology and we tend to demonize it, but to me, you have to use it as an opportunity for introspection. Our fears ultimately should be of ourselves and other people."
O'Reilly calls financial markets "the first rogue AI," while also priasing innovators like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos for moving humankind in new and positive directions. And he also calls Uber "a good metaphor for what's right and wrong in tech" because of its clashes with both its drivers and city governments.

"It's interesting that Lyft, which has been both more cooperative in general and better to drivers, is gaining share. That indicates there's a competitive advantage in doing it right, and you can only go so far being an ass."

An anonymous reader shares an article from O'Reilly Media's VP of content strategy: It's high time to build the internet that we wanted all along: a network designed to respect privacy, a network designed to be secure, and a network designed to impose reasonable controls on behavior. And a network with few barriers to entry -- in particular, the certainty of ISP extortion as new services pay to get into the "fast lane." Is it time to start over from scratch, with new protocols that were designed with security, privacy, and maybe even accountability in mind? Is it time to pull the plug on the abusive old internet, with its entrenched monopolistic carriers, its pervasive advertising, and its spam? Could we start over again?

That would be painful, but not impossible... In his deliciously weird novel Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow writes about an alternative network built from open WiFi access points. It sounds similar to Google's Project Fi, but built and maintained by a hacker underground. Could Doctorow's vision be our future backboneless backbone? A network of completely distributed municipal networks, with long haul segments over some public network, but with low-level protocols designed for security? We'd have to invent some new technology to build that new network, but that's already started.
The article cites the increasing popularity of peer-to-peer functionality everywhere from Bitcoin and Blockchain to the Beaker browser, the Federated Wiki, and even proposals for new file-sharing protocols like IPFS and Upspin. "Can we build a network that can't be monopolized by monopolists? Yes, we can..."

"It's time to build the network we want, and not just curse the network we have."

dovf writes: Just got an email from O'Reilly Media that as of today, they are no longer selling individual books or videos online -- rather, they are encouraging people to sign up for Safari. They are continuing to publish books and videos, "and you'll still be able to buy them at Amazon and other retailers." They also make it clear that we will not lose access to already-purchased content, updates to such content, etc. More details can be found in the FAQ. No mention, though, of whether the content sold at these other retailers will remain DRM-free... From the FAQ: "You can buy all of the books (ebooks and print) at shop.oreilly.com from Amazon and other digital and bricks-and-mortar retailers. We're no longer selling individual books and videos via shop.oreilly.com -- but we are definitely continuing to publish books and videos on the topics you need to know. And of course, every O'Reilly book and video (including O'Reilly conference sessions) is available instantly on Safari." The only mention of "DRM" in the FAQ is in regard to what happens to the digital content you have in your account at members.oreilly.com. According to O'Reilly, "Your DRM-free ebooks and videos are safe and sound, and you'll continue to have free lifetime access to download them anytime, anywhere."

An anonymous reader shares a press release: This week, O'Reilly Media stopped retailing books directly on our ecommerce store. You might say "what!?" Or you might say "what's the big deal?" Before I explain our business strategy here, there are two important things to note: We are absolutely continuing to publish the top-quality books that are important to the communities we serve.
1. We still sell them through Amazon or your favorite retailer.
2. So why the change? It's clear that we're in the midst of a fundamental shift in how people get and use their content.
Subscription services like Spotify and Netflix are the new norm, as people opt for paying for digital access rather than purchasing physical units one by one. We've already seen this in our own business -- the growth of membership on Safari far exceeds the individual units previously purchased on oreilly.com. That's one reason for the change.

For the first time in 90-year Oscar history, a video game is eligible for an Academy Award, specifically the recently-released game Everything. From a report: The 11-minute trailer for philosophical pontificating simulator Everything is eligible for an Academy Award -- a first for a video game promotion, boasted game developer David OReilly. The marketing material in question is included under the Academy's category "[best] animated short film," which it became eligible for after winning the Jury Prize for animation at the VIS Vienna Shorts film festival. Everything's lengthy trailer focuses on the correlation between the universe's smallest, biggest, and most remote entities, all while being narrated by the late British philosopher Alan Watts.

An anonymous reader quotes OReilly.com's interview with the CEO of Affectiva, an emotion-measurement technology company that grew out of MIT's Media Lab. We can mine Twitter, for example, on text sentiment, but that only gets us so far. About 35-40% is conveyed in tone of voice -- how you say something -- and the remaining 50-60% is read through facial expressions and gestures you make. Technology that reads your emotional state, for example by combining facial and voice expressions, represents the emotion AI space. They are the subconscious, natural way we communicate emotion, which is nonverbal and which complements our language... Facial expressions and speech actually deal more with the subconscious, and are more unbiased and unfiltered expressions of emotion...

Rather than encoding specific rules that depict when a person is making a specific expression, we instead focus our attention on building intelligent algorithms that can be trained to recognize expressions. Through our partnerships across the globe, we have amassed an enormous emotional database from people driving cars, watching media content, etc. A portion of the data is then passed on to our labeling team, who are certified in the Facial Action Coding System...we have gathered 5,313,751 face videos, for a total of 38,944 hours of data, representing nearly two billion facial frames analyzed.
They got their start testing advertisements, and now are already working with a third of all Fortune 500 companies. ("We've seen that pet care and baby ads in the U.S. elicit more enjoyment than cereal ads -- which see the most enjoyment in Canada.") One company even combined their technology with Google Glass to help autistic children learn to recognize emotional cues.

97 Things Every Programmer Should Know was published seven years ago by O'Reilly Media, and was described as "pearls of wisdom for programmers collected from leading practitioners." Today an anonymous reader writes: All 97 are available online for free (and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3), including an essay by "Uncle Bob" on taking personal responsibility and "Unix Tools Are Your Friend" by Athens-based professor Diomidis Spinellis, who writes that the Unix tool chest can be more useful than an IDE.

But the book's official site is also still accepting new submissions, and now points to 68 additional "edited contributions" (plus another seven "contributions in progress"), including "Be Stupid and Lazy" by Swiss-based Java programmer Mario Fusco, and "Decouple That UI" by tech trainer George Brooke.
"There is no overarching narrative," writes the site's editor Kevlin Henney (who also wrote the original book). "The collection is intended simply to contain multiple and varied perspectives on what it is that contributors to the project feel programmers should know...anything from code-focused advice to culture, from algorithm usage to agile thinking, from implementation know-how to professionalism, from style to substance..."

An anonymous reader writes: Andy Oram, who's been an editor at O'Reilly since 1992, has written a new free report about how open source software is everywhere in Brazil. The country's IT industry is booming in Brazil -- still Latin America's most vibrant economy -- with open source software popular in both startups and in cloud infrastructure. Oram attributes this partly to the government's support of open source software, which over the last 15 years has built public awareness about its power and potential. And says the Brazil now has a thriving open source community, and several free software movements. Even small towns have hacker spaces for collaboration and training, and the country has several free software movements.

On Friday, O'Reilly Media announced "Our Cyber Monday sale starts now." An anonymous reader writes: They're offering a 50% discount on every ebook they publish -- over 14,000 titles from O'Reilly, No Starch Press, Pearson, A Book Apart, Make, Packt, and 25 other book publishers. (And they're offering a 60 percent discount on orders over $100.) Just use the code CYBER16 when checking out to claim the discount. The sale continues through Tuesday morning at 5 a.m. PST.

These are all DRM-free ebooks (in multiple formats), and there's even some "early release" editions -- advance copies distributed before their official publication. The discount also applies to new titles like "Head First Python" as well as old-school classics like "Learning Perl". Right now their best-sellers are "Wicked Cool Shell Scripts", "Modern Linux Administration", and "You Don't Know JS: Up and Going" -- but again, the discount applies to any ebook that they sell, and they also still have their selection of free programming texts.
Tim O'Reilly was one of the first people interviewed by Slashdot -- more than 17 years ago.

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: There's now a section on OReilly.com offering free ebooks about computer programming. There's four free Java ebooks and seven about Python, as well as an "Other" section which contains ebooks like C++ Today, Swift Pocket Reference, and Why Rust? But there's also some broader categories for Open Source and Software Architecture ebooks, as well as separate sections for their free ebooks about Data, Security, Web Development, and the Internet of Things.

Long-time Slashdot reader Esther Schindler points us to a new article at OReilly.com: Those of us who telecommute cannot quite fathom the reasons companies give for refusing to let people work from home. But even if you don't agree with their decision, they do have reasons -- and not all of them are, "Because we like to be idiots." In "5 reasons why the company you want to work for won't hire telecommuters", hiring managers share their sincere reasons to insist you work in the office -- and a few tips for how you might convince them otherwise.
The arguments against telecommuting range from "creativity happens in the hallway" to "the extra logistics aren't worth it," and the article suggests the best counterarguments include pointing out a past history of successfully telecommuting and allowing your employer to gradually transition you into a remote position. And if all else fails, just become a "rock star," because according to one tech placement company, "For the right talent and when a role has been open for a very long time, they tend to give in."