Liam Proven reports via The Register: Bad news for those who want to play with OpenVMS in non-production use. Older versions are disappearing, and the terms are getting much more restrictive. The corporation behind the continued development of OpenVMS, VMS Software, Inc. -- or VSI to its friends, if it has any left after this -- has announced the latest Updates to the Community Program. The news does not look good: you can't get the Alpha and Itanium versions any more, only a limited x86-64 edition.

OpenVMS is one of the granddaddies of big serious OSes. A direct descendant of the OSes that inspired DOS, CP/M, OS/2, and Windows, as well as the native OS of the hardware on which Unix first went 32-bit, VMS has been around for nearly half a century. For decades, its various owners have offered various flavors of "hobbyist program" under which you could get licenses to install and run it for free, as long as it wasn't in production use. Since Compaq acquired DEC, then HP acquired Compaq, its prospects looked checkered. HP officially killed it off in 2013, then in 2014 granted it a reprieve and sold it off instead. New owner VSI ported it to x86-64, releasing that new version 9.2 in 2022. Around this time last year, we covered VSI adding AMD support and opening a hobbyist program of its own. It seems from the latest announcement that it has been disappointed by the reception: "Despite our initial aspirations for robust community engagement, the reality has fallen short of our expectations. The level of participation in activities such as contributing open source software, creating wiki articles, and providing assistance on forums has not matched the scale of the program. As a result, we find ourselves at a crossroads, compelled to reassess and recalibrate our approach."

Although HPE stopped offering hobbyist licenses for the original VAX versions of OpenVMS in 2020, VSI continued to maintain OpenVMS 8 (in other words, the Alpha and Itanium editions) while it worked on version 9 for x86-64. VSI even offered a Student Edition, which included a freeware Alpha emulator and a copy of OpenVMS 8.4 to run inside it. Those licenses run out in 2025, and they won't be renewed. If you have vintage DEC Alpha or HP Integrity boxes with Itanic chips, you won't be able to get a legal licensed copy of OpenVMS for them, or renew the license of any existing installations -- unless you pay, of course. There will still be a Community license edition, but from now on it's x86-64 only. Although OpenVMS 9 mainly targets hypervisors anyway, it does support bare-metal operations on a single model of HPE server, the ProLiant DL380 Gen10. If you have one of them to play with -- well, tough. Now Community users only get a VM image, supplied as a VMWare .vmdk file. It contains a ready-to-go "OpenVMS system disk with OpenVMS, compilers and development tools installed." Its license runs for a year, after which you will get a fresh copy. This means you won't be able to configure your own system and keep it alive -- you'll have to recreate it, from scratch, annually. The only alternative for those with older systems is to apply to be an OpenVMS Ambassador.

The Wall Street Journal reports that more companies are phasing out "feedback" bosses give to workers — and replacing it with "feedforward."

"The idea is that 'feedforward' gives people less anxiety," the Journal's reporter said in a video interview. "It's a little bit gentler. When people hear 'feedback', they think immediately, 'What have I done wrong? What are the bad things my boss is going to tell me to fix?'" And another reason that we're hearing "feedforward" at these companies over and over is employees are younger. Younger employees make up a larger percentage of the workforce today, and a number of experts with whom we spoke said that younger employees are more comfortable with gentler terms like "feedforward"...

Q: So they're trying to appeal to the younger employees who are sensitive to harsher reviews, feedback or criticism. But do the employees need to learn how to better receive this type of constructive criticism, regardless of what you call it?

A: Some experts say that younger employees do need to be prepared for negative feedback. And just the rebranding or replacing of a word could have a negative effect, and perhaps managers won't be as comfortable providing negative feedback if they're just thinking about this as a way to tell an employee what they've done well...

Certain companies are really revamping their entire review process, trying to make it so that employees and managers are more communicative and really addressing any issues or concerns, so that they can work more productively. In some cases if companies are just rebranding "feedback" with "feedforward" or other terms, people with whom I spoke were concerned that this is just a hollow effort.

And there is a possibility that younger generations won't learn about what they're doing wrong and how to improve... [W]e did speak with an expert who said that baby boomers learned to suck it up and perform. And this trend really is generational.
From the Journal's article: At Microsoft, managers are encouraged to use the word "perspectives" instead of traditional feedback, according to current and former employees. Reviews, meanwhile, have been branded as "connect" conversations. The company also recently stopped including anonymous comments from peers in employee reviews, instead showing the names of the colleagues in question... Jennifer Solomon-Baum, a former Microsoft marketing director who left early this year, says she understands why the company chose to rethink its approach to feedback, which she feels may have made employees more open to giving feedback. On the other hand, she says Microsoft's recent decision to put an end to anonymous peer feedback in reviews completely backfired. In the wake of the change, "we didn't get the richness of constructive criticism," says Solomon-Baum, who is now consulting and leading marketing for a new ballet company in Los Angeles. "It became a praise festival...."

The divide on the issue is partially generational, several HR specialists say... Many younger employees entered the workforce while managers had loosened expectations on productivity and performance, and may have had less stringent grading in college amid remote classes, making the postpandemic adjustment more difficult. "It's the first time that they have not just gotten professional feedback, but it might be the first time in quite a while that somebody said, 'You know, this isn't good enough,'" says Megan Gerhardt, a management professor at Miami University and the author of a book on leading intergenerational workforces.
"I refuse to believe this is true," writes Apple blogger John Gruber, "and if it is true, my feedback is that any company that encounters an employee who bristles at the word feedback should fire them on the spot."

Short seller Hindenburg Research, on Block: Block, formerly known as Square, is a $44 billion market cap company that claims to have developed a "frictionless" and "magical" financial technology with a mission to empower the "unbanked" and the "underbanked." Our 2-year investigation has concluded that Block has systematically taken advantage of the demographics it claims to be helping. The "magic" behind Block's business has not been disruptive innovation, but rather the company's willingness to facilitate fraud against consumers and the government, avoid regulation, dress up predatory loans and fees as revolutionary technology, and mislead investors with inflated metrics. Our research involved dozens of interviews with former employees, partners, and industry experts, extensive review of regulatory and litigation records, and FOIA and public records requests.

Most analysts are excited about the post-pandemic surge of Block's Cash App platform, with expectations that its 51 million monthly transacting active users and low customer acquisition costs will drive high margin growth and serve as a future platform to offer new products. Our research indicates, however, that Block has wildly overstated its genuine user counts and has understated its customer acquisition costs. Former employees estimated that 40%-75% of accounts they reviewed were fake, involved in fraud, or were additional accounts tied to a single individual. Core to the issue is that Block has embraced one traditionally very "underbanked" segment of the population: criminals. The company's "Wild West" approach to compliance made it easy for bad actors to mass-create accounts for identity fraud and other scams, then extract stolen funds quickly.

Even when users were caught engaging in fraud or other prohibited activity, Block blacklisted the account without banning the user. A former customer service rep shared screenshots showing how blacklisted accounts were regularly associated with dozens or hundreds of other active accounts suspected of fraud. This phenomenon of allowing blacklisted users was so common that rappers bragged about it in hip hop songs. Block obfuscates how many individuals are on the Cash App platform by reporting misleading "transacting active" metrics filled with fake and duplicate accounts. Block can and should clarify to investors an estimate on how many unique people actually use Cash App.

The wildly popular series Squid Game drew criticism for its English subtitles. Just how did those happen? CNET News: Subtitlers contend with unrealistic expectations, tight deadlines and competition from clunky machine translation. Often, their work goes underappreciated, under the radar. Sometimes Uludag would be sent a file to translate at 11 p.m. -- "and they would say we need it by 8 a.m." Without skilled subtitlers, movies such as historic Oscar winner Parasite are lost in translation. Yet the art of subtitling is on the decline, all but doomed in an entertainment industry tempted by cheaper emerging artificial intelligence technologies. Subtitlers have become a dying breed.

And this had been the predicament before the world started watching a little show called Squid Game. In 28 days, Squid Game leapfrogged Bridgerton as Netflix's most popular series ever. It also inadvertently started a global conversation about bad subtitles. While critics lauded the South Korean battle royale-themed drama for its polished production values, gripping story and memorable characters, many accused Netflix of skimping on the quality of Squid Game's English subtitles.

A prime example: Ali, the Pakistani laborer, shares a touching moment with Sang Woo, an embezzler who graduated from Korea's top university. Sang Woo suggests Ali call him hyung, instead of sajang-nim or "Mr. Company President." The term hyung literally translates as "older brother," a term used by a man to address an older man with whom he has formed a closer bond. That's Ali and Sang Woo. Yet, the line "Call me hyung" was translated as "Call me Sang Woo." A rare moment of compassion and humanity, amid all the gloom and gore, was lost. [...]

Yet Netflix, which abandoned its in-house subtitling program Hermes one year after its launch in 2017, is interested in a different area of translation: dubbing. It's not hard to see why. For example, 72% of Netflix's American viewers said they prefer dubs when watching Spanish hit Money Heist, Netflix's third most popular show ever. Unfairly criticized, underfunded and facing a lack of support from the entertainment industry, subtitlers are on the brink. At least the Squid Game controversy illuminated an unsung fact: Good subtitles are an exceptionally difficult art.

Even as supply-chain snarls ease, wage growth and price expectations are ticking up. The Economist: The bad news on inflation just keeps coming. At more than 9% year on year across the rich world, it has not been this high since the 1980s -- and there have never been so many "inflation surprises," where the data have come in higher than economists' forecasts (see chart in the linked story). This, in turn, is taking a heavy toll on the economy and financial markets. Central banks are raising interest rates and ending bond-buying schemes, crushing equities. Consumer confidence in many places is now even lower than it was in the early days of the covid-19 pandemic. "Real-time" economic indicators of everything from housing activity to manufacturing output suggest that economic growth is slowing sharply.

What consumer prices do next is therefore one of the most important questions for the global economy. Many forecasters expect that annual inflation will soon ebb, in part because of last year's sharp increases in commodity prices falling out of the year-on-year comparison. In its latest economic projections the Federal Reserve, for instance, expects annual inflation in America (as measured by the personal-consumption-expenditure index) to fall from 5.2% at the end of this year to 2.6% by the end of 2023. You might be forgiven for not taking these prognostications too seriously. After all, most economists failed to see the inflationary surge coming, and then wrongly predicted it would quickly fade. In a paper published in May, Jeremy Rudd of the Fed made a provocative point: "Our understanding of how the economy works -- as well as our ability to predict the effects of shocks and policy actions -- is in my view no better today than it was in the 1960s." The future path of inflation is, to a great extent, shrouded in uncertainty.

Some indicators point to more price pressure to come in the near term. Alternative Macro Signals, a consultancy, runs millions of news articles through a model to construct a "news inflation pressure index." The results, which are more timely than the official inflation figures, measure not just how frequently price pressures are mentioned, but also whether the news flow suggests that pressures are building up. In both America and the euro area the index is still miles above 50, indicating that pressures are continuing to build. Inflation worry-warts can point to three other indicators suggesting that the rich world is unlikely to return to the pre-pandemic norm of low, stable price growth any time soon: rising wage growth, and increases in the inflation expectations of both consumers and companies.

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: Google marked what would've been Stephen Hawking's 80th birthday with a very special Doodle — an animated video in which the voice of Stephen Hawking speaks again, generated and used with the approval of the Hawking estate.

"My expectations were reduced to zero at 21. Everything since then has been a bonus," Hawking says in the video. "Although I cannot move and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free. I have spent my life travelling across the universe, inside my mind."

In the video tribute, Stephen Hawking passes near a black hole on a model timeline of the universe. "We are very very small," he says. "But we are profoundly capable of very very big things.

"There should be no boundaries to human endeavor. However bad life may seem. While there is life, there is hope. Be brave, be curious, be determined, overcome the odds. It can be done."
"From colliding black holes to the Big Bang, his theories on the origins and mechanics of the universe revolutionized modern physics," explains the Google Doodles page, "while his best-selling books made the field widely accessible to millions of readers worldwide."

And Google's Arts and Culture blog shares a longer look at Stephen Hawking's life, including a 1979 photo of young Hawking at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University. "Because of Stephen Hawking's work, the radiation emitted by black holes is now called Hawking Radiation," the biography says at one point, also remembering Hawking's best-selling book A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes.

But they also share some more personal memories: In 1990, with lifelong friend, the physicist Kip Thorne, Stephen approached the controversial notion of whether time travel is allowed by the laws of physics. To explore this hypothesis Stephen planned a party for time travellers. He wrote invitations, set a date, time and venue and provided precise GPS coordinates.

Stephen did not send out the invitations until after the party date was over. That way, only those who could genuinely travel back in time would know of it and be able to attend.

On the due day Stephen sat politely and waited. But no-one came. And that was the point. "I have experimental evidence that time travel is not possible", he said afterwards. And the champagne went back on ice....
The biography closes with this quote from Stephen Hawking. "Remember to look up at the stars, and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe.

"Be curious, and however difficult life may seem there is always something you can do and succeed at; it matters that you don't just give up."

As California approaches the biggest state tax rebate in U.S. history, Bloomberg News co-founder Matthew A. Winkler questions its reputation as a state doomed by over-regulation and high taxes.

In fact, California "has no peers among developed economies for expanding GDP, creating jobs, raising household income, manufacturing growth, investment in innovation, producing clean energy and unprecedented wealth through its stocks and bonds." By adding 1.3 million people to its non-farm payrolls since April last year — equal to the entire workforce of Nevada — California easily surpassed also-rans Texas and New York. At the same time, California household income increased $164 billion, almost as much as Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania combined, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. No wonder California's operating budget surplus, fueled by its surging economy and capital gains taxes, swelled to a record $75 billion...

While pundits have long insisted California policies are bad for business, reality belies them. In a sign of investor demand, the weight of California companies in the benchmark S&P 500 Index increased 3 percentage points since a year ago, the most among all states, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Faith in California credit was similarly superlative, with the weight of corporate bonds sold by companies based in the state rising the most among all states, to 12.5 percentage points from 11.7 percentage points, according to the Bloomberg Barclays U.S. Corporate Bond Index. Translation: Investors had the greatest confidence in California companies during the pandemic. The most trusted measure of economic strength says California is the world-beater among democracies. The state's gross domestic product increased 21% during the past five years, dwarfing No. 2 New York (14%) and No. 3 Texas (12%), according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The gains added $530 billion to the Golden State, 30% more than the increase for New York and Texas combined and equivalent to the entire economy of Sweden.

Among the five largest economies, California outperforms the U.S., Japan and Germany with a growth rate exceeded only by China...

Corporate California also is the undisputed leader in renewable energy, with 26 companies worth $897 billion, or 36% of the U.S. industry, having reported 10% or more of their revenues derived from clean technology. No state comes close to matching the 21% of electricity derived from solar energy. Shares of these firms appreciated 282% during the past 12 months and 1,003%, 1,140% and 9,330% over two, five and 10 years, respectively, with no comparable rivals anywhere in the world, according to BloombergNEF. The same companies also increased their workforce 35% since 2019, almost tripling the rate for the rest U.S. overall and four times the global rate...

California companies invested 16% of their revenues in R&D, or their future, when the rest of the U.S. put aside just 1%...

Much has been made of the state reporting its first yearly loss in population, or 182,000 last year. Had it not been for the Trump administration preventing new visas, depriving as many as 150,000 people from moving to California from other countries annually, the 2020 outcome would have been more favorable.

Undergraduate college enrollment fell again this spring, down nearly 5% from a year ago. That means 727,000 fewer students, according to new data from the National Student Clearinghouse. NPR reports: "That's really dramatic," says Doug Shapiro, who leads the clearinghouse's research center. Fall enrollment numbers had indicated things were bad, with a 3.6% undergraduate decline compared with a year earlier, but experts were waiting to see if those students who held off in the fall would enroll in the spring. That didn't appear to happen. "Despite all kinds of hopes and expectations that things would get better, they've only gotten worse in the spring," Shapiro says. "It's really the end of a truly frightening year for higher education. There will be no easy fixes or quick bounce backs."

Overall enrollment in undergraduate and graduate programs has been trending downward since around 2012, and that was true again this spring, which saw a 3.5% decline -- seven times worse than the drop from spring 2019 to spring 2020. The National Student Clearinghouse attributed that decline entirely to undergraduates across all sectors, including for-profit colleges. Community colleges, which often enroll more low-income students and students of color, remained hardest hit by far, making up more than 65% of the total undergraduate enrollment losses this spring. On average, U.S. community colleges saw an enrollment drop of 9.5%, which translates to 476,000 fewer students. [...] Based on her conversations with students, [Heidi Aldes, dean of enrollment management at Minneapolis College, a community college in Minnesota] attributes the enrollment decline to a number of factors, including being online, the "pandemic paralysis" community members felt when COVID-19 first hit, and the financial situations families found themselves in.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After over a year of requests from fans and enthusiasts, and months of official teases, Microsoft Flight Simulator has a virtual reality mode. Whether you play the game via Steam or the Windows Store, you can now take advantage of "OpenXR" calls to seemingly any PC-VR system on the market, aided by an "enable/disable VR" keyboard shortcut at any time. This summer, ahead of the game's final-stretch beta test, the developers at Asobo Studio used a screen-share feature in a video call to tease the VR mode to us at Ars Technica. This is never an ideal way to show off VR, in part because the platform requires high refresh rates for comfortable play, which can't be smoothly sent in a pandemic-era video call. But even for a video call, it looked choppy. Asobo's team assured us that the incomplete VR mode was running well -- but of course, we're all on edge about game-preview assurances as of late. Now that users have been formally invited to slap Microsoft Flight Simulator onto their faces, I must strongly urge users not to do so -- or at least heavily temper their expectations. Honestly, Asobo Studio should've issued these warnings, not me, because this mode is nowhere near retail-ready.

Ultimately, trying to use the 2020 version of MSFS within its VR mode's "potato" settings is a stupid idea until some kinks get worked out. It's bad enough how many visual toggles must be dropped to PS2 levels to reach a comfortable 90 fps refresh; what's worse is that even in this low-fidelity baseline, you'll still face serious stomach-turning anguish in the form of constant frametime spikes. Turn the details up to a "medium" level in order to savor the incredible graphics engine Asobo built, of course, and you're closer to 45 fps. I didn't even bother finding an average performance for the settings at maximum. That test made me sick enough to delay this article by a few hours. [...] The thing is, my VR stomach can always survive the first few minutes of a bumpy refresh before I have to rip my headset off in anguish -- and this was long enough to see the absolute potential of MSFS as a must-play VR library addition. I don't have an ultrawide monitor, so testing MSFS has always been an exercise in wishing for a better field of view -- to replicate the glance-all-over behavior of actual flight. Getting a taste of that in my headset -- with accurate cockpit lighting, impressive volumetric clouds, and 3D modeling of my plane's various sounds -- made me want to sit for hours in this mode and get lost in compelling, realistic flight. But even the most iron stomachs can only take so much screen flicker within VR before churning, and that makes MSFS's demanding 3D engine a terrible fit for the dream of hours-long VR flight... at least, for the time being.

Late last night, it was rumored that Japan's longest-serving prime minister, Shinzo Abe, would step down due to his struggle with ulcerative colitis. Abe confirmed the reports this morning, telling reporters that it was "gut wrenching" to leave many of his goals unfinished. He also apologized for stepping down during the pandemic. The Associated Press reports: Abe has had ulcerative colitis since he was a teenager and has said the condition was controlled with treatment. Concerns about his health began this summer and grew this month when he visited a Tokyo hospital two weeks in a row for unspecified health checkups. He is now on a new treatment that requires IV injections, he said. While there is some improvement, there is no guarantee that it will cure his condition and so he decided to step down after treatment Monday, he said.

"It is gut wrenching to have to leave my job before accomplishing my goals," Abe said Friday, mentioning his failure to resolve the issue of Japanese abducted years ago by North Korea, a territorial dispute with Russia and a revision of Japan's war-renouncing constitution. He said his health problem was under control until earlier this year but was found to have worsened in June when he had an annual checkup. "Faced with the illness and treatment, as well as the pain of lacking physical strength ... I decided I should not stay on as prime minister when I'm no longer capable of living up to the people's expectations with confidence," Abe said at a news conference. Slashdot reader shanen writes: [...] In theory, [Shinzo Abe] was the supreme leader of one of the most important countries in the technological world. In practice, not so much?

At a minimum, the New Akiba is far different from the Akihabara of yore, but maybe it's just a chronological coincidence? They are making quite pretty COVID-19 sneeze pictures with the new Japanese supercomputer. I have to admit that either Abe hasn't accomplished that much or he's pretty bad at tooting his own horn. I would be surprised if anyone could articulate what Abe actually stood for even after all these years in the spotlight.

Perhaps the funny part is that Abe was apparently just clinging to power to set a new endurance record as Prime Minister. He passed the old number one just a few days ago. But looking forward, I'm actually more interested in trigger effects. My current speculation is that Kishida will snag the ring and he's liable to come out much stronger against China. Xi was already annoyed and I am still expecting stock market turmoil in October, but this may make it worse. Further reading: Japan's Longest-Serving PM, Shinzo Abe, Quits In Bid To 'Escape' Potential Prosecution

Jennifer Riggins is participating in the Oxford Vaccine Trial. She's an American technology journalist and marketer who's self-employed in London — and she's also agreed to answer some questions from Slashdot!

Slashdot: Can you give me any details on what it's like when you go in for your shots? (Like, are they somber, or enthusiastic...?) Do you chat at all? Do they know you by name?

JR: For sure they know me by name, at least after glancing at charts or if I call the hotline. The doctors and nurses don't know which dose I got — this COVID vaccine or the placebo which is the meningitis vaccine. It's their job to make me feel comfortable so I stay volunteering and they can get as much info from me (like about reactions) as they can.

It's actually a lot of fun for me. I love the medical talk and ask loads of questions and they are totally transparent and kind.

Plus working from home with my also full-time-working husband and our three year old during the pandemic, a surprise benefit is a bit of me time including the hour-long walk to hospital each way.

Slashdot: Have you ever made contact with any of the other participants?

JR: Just a nod "hello" here and there. No one I've seen chats like me — ha. But also we are kept far apart because, you know, pandemic.

And Jennifer had a lot more to say about her experience, the rewards, the reactions, and the media coverage of it all...

Syd Mead, the artistic director on Blade Runner says Tesla's new Cybertruck "has completely changed the vocabulary of the personal truck market design."

Or, for another perspective, "Tesla's Cybertruck looks weird... like, really weird," wrote Toni Sacconaghi, a senior equity research analyst at the global asset management firm AllianceBernstein. "Add a little bit of dirt, and you could even say it gives off a retro-future vibe a la Mad Max."

That's from a Market Insider article citing Wall Street analysts they say "aren't buying the futuristic design of Tesla's new electric pickup truck." For example, Dan Levy of Credit Suisse, who wrote "amid the radical design for Cybertruck, it's somewhat unclear to us who the core buyer will be." "We do not see this vehicle in its current form being a success," Jeffrey Osborne of Cowen wrote in a note on Friday, adding that he doesn't see the Tesla brand or the Cybertruck design "resonating with existing pickup truck owners...."

Still, the Cybertruck's design wasn't unanimously disliked by Wall Street. The design "will be a hit with the company's fanatic EV installed base globally as Musk & Co. are clearly thinking way out of the box on this model design," Dan Ives of Wedbush wrote in a Friday note....

[And] "While styling will always be subjective, we believe the unique and futuristic design will resonate with consumers, leading to solid demand," Jed Dorsheimer of Canaccord Genuity wrote in a Friday note.
The article also quotes Toni Sacconaghi of Bernstein as saying that the "really futuristic, like cyberpunk Blade Runner" design "is too bad, because its on-paper specs are insane."

But IGN reports there's another group commenting enthusiastically on the Cybertruck's looks: gamers. Unlike anything else we've seen from Musk's line of vehicles before, the Tesla truck resembles something you'd see in an old video game set in the future or sci-fi flick from the late '90s to the early 2000s.

Of course, gamers all over the internet couldn't help themselves from sharing images, making memes, and drawing comparisons to look-alikes we've seen in games, TV shows, and movies... According to the internet, the Tesla Cybertruck either hasn't finished rendering yet or is made of some very dated graphics. Either way, it takes us back to the days where we got to experience the famous low-poly Lara Croft.

"Everyone knows security needs to be baked into the development lifecycle, but that doesn't mean it is," writes ZDNet, reporting on a new survey they say showed that "long-standing friction between security and development teams remain."

The results came from GitLab's "2019 Global Developer Report: DevSecOps" survey of over 4,000 software professionals. Nearly half of security pros surveyed, 49%, said they struggle to get developers to make remediation of vulnerabilities a priority. Worse still, 68% of security professionals feel fewer than half of developers can spot security vulnerabilities later in the life cycle. Roughly half of security professionals said they most often found bugs after code is merged in a test environment.

At the same time, nearly 70% of developers said that while they are expected to write secure code, they get little guidance or help. One disgruntled programmer said, "It's a mess, no standardization, most of my work has never had a security scan." Another problem is it seems many companies don't take security seriously enough. Nearly 44% of those surveyed reported that they're not judged on their security vulnerabilities.
ZDNet also cites Linus Torvalds' remarks on the Linux kernel mailing list in 2017, complaining about how security people celebrate when code is hardened against an invalid access. "[F]rom a developer standpoint, things really are not done. Not even close. From a developer standpoint, the bad access was just a symptom, and it needs to be reported, and debugged, and fixed, so that the bug actually gets corrected. So from a developer standpoint, the end point of hardening is just the starting point, and when you think you're done, we're really only getting started."

Torvalds then pointed out that the user community also has a third set of entirely different expectations, adding that "the number one rule of kernel development is that 'we don't break users'. Because without users, your program is pointless, and all the development work you've done over decades is pointless... and security is pointless too, in the end." Juggling the interest of users and developers, Torvalds suggests security people should adopt "do no harm" as their mantra, and "when adding hardening features, the first step should *ALWAYS* be 'just report it'. Not killing things, not even stopping the access. Report it. Nothing else."

Facebook will now let you file a complaint about businesses you've had a problem with if you bought something after clicking on one of their ads. If enough people complain about a business, it could lead to Facebook banning the company from running ads. The Verge reports: The new policy is rolling out globally starting today, and it's meant to help Facebook fight back against another type of advertising abuse on its platform. Facebook says it's trying to combat "bad shopping experiences," which can cost customers and make them frustrated with Facebook, too. Facebook is particularly interested in a few problem areas: shipping times, product quality, and customer service. This isn't just a matter of misleading advertising: if a company regularly provides bad service, products that don't meet buyers' expectations, or just frustrates consumers, they risk getting in trouble with the platform.

It appears that Facebook will send notifications to users to ask about their experience if it detects that they've purchased something after clicking on an ad. You'll also be able to find those companies and leave feedback on the Ads Activity page. Facebook says it will inform businesses about negative feedback and try to pinpoint problems that a large number of customers are having. If customer feedback doesn't improve after a warning, Facebook will eventually start to limit how many ads a company can run. If it continues long enough, they can be banned.

An anonymous reader quotes former Reddit product head Dan McComas: I think, ultimately, the problem that Reddit has is the same as Twitter and Discord. By focusing on growth and growth only and ignoring the problems, they amassed a large set of cultural norms on their platforms. Their cultural norms are different for every community, but they tend to stem from harassment or abuse or bad behavior, and they have worked themselves into a position where they're completely defensive... I really don't believe it's possible for either of them to catch up on the problem. I think the best that they can do is figure out how to hide this behavior from an average user.

I don't see any way that it's going to improve. I have no hope for either of those platforms. I just think that the problems are too ingrained, in not only the site and the site's communities and users but in the general understanding and expectations of the public... I don't think that they're going to be able to turn these things around...

I fundamentally believe that my time at Reddit made the world a worse place. And that sucks, and it sucks to have to say that about myself... I've got a lot of advice for start-ups, and it's not very fucking complicated. It's just: Think about the impact that you want to have on your users and on the people consuming your content and do the right thing... Don't be idiots about it. You're people, you see what's going on, you see trends that are forming, just fucking do something. It's not that hard.

mikeatTB writes: Many Slashdotters weighed in on Steven A. Lowe's post, "Is Project Management Killing Good Products, Teams and Software?", where he slammed project management and called for product-centrism. Many commenters pushed back, but one PM, Yvette Schmitter, has fired back with a scathing response post, noting: "As a project manager, I'm saddened to see that project management and project managers are getting a bad rap from both ends of the spectrum. Business tends not to see the value in them, and developers tend to believe their own 'creativity' is being stymied by them. Let's set the record straight: Project management is a prized methodology for delivering on leadership's expectations.

"The success of the methodology depends on the quality of the specific project manager..." she continues. "If the project is being managed correctly by the project manager/scrum master, that euphoric state that developers want to get to can be achieved, along with the project objectives -- all within the prescribed budget and timeline. Denouncing an entire practice based on what appears to be a limited, misaligned application of the correct methodology does not make all of project management and all project managers bad."
How do Slashdot readers feel about project management for software teams?

Wired reports that Doppler Labs, the company behind Here One smart earbuds, has announced that it's shutting down all operations today. The Verge reports: Founded in 2013, Doppler Labs debuted the prototype of its Here Active Listening System two years later in 2015. The battery-powered earbuds, according to Doppler Labs founder and CEO Noah Kraft, were built to enhance sound in the world around you. By using the accompanying app, users could, in theory, apply any manner of EQ settings that did everything from reduce overwhelming bass frequencies at a concert to dim the midrange chatter of co-workers while in an office. Kraft's vision for Doppler's future was an compelling idea -- "we want to put a computer, speaker, and mic in everyone's ear" -- but the Here Active Listening System was met with mixed reviews. In 2016, the company announced a new version of the earbuds, now called Here One. Dubbed "augmented reality earbuds," these earbuds allowed for streaming audio via Bluetooth, combined with the sound-enhancement tools seen in the Here Active Listening System. It seemed to offer the best of both worlds: a way to not only blend music or content playing in-ear with ambient noise, but the ability to adjust that ambient noise as well. Unfortunately, in bringing Here One to market the company was met with a raft of problems. According to Wired, a manufacturer change pushed production delivery from the fall 2016 to February 2017. There was also bad news on the battery front. The company hoped to offer 4.5 hours of battery life using augmented hearing and three hours of music streaming, but the unit's Bluetooth chip wound up diminishing those expectations.

Joshua Topolsky, writing for the Outline: Once upon a time, Apple could do little wrong. As one of the first mainstream computer companies to equally value design and technical simplicity, it upended our expectations about what PCs could be. "Macintosh works the way people work," read one 1992 ad. Rather than requiring downloads and installations and extra memory to get things right (as often required by Windows machines), Apple made it so you could just plug in a mouse or start up a program and it would just... work. Marrying that functionality with the groundbreaking design the company has embodied since the early Macs, it's easy to see how Apple became the darling of designers, artists, and the rest of the creative class. The work was downright elegant; unheard of for an electronics company. [...] But things changed. In 2013 I wrote about the confusing and visually abrasive turn Apple had made with the introduction of iOS 7, the operating system refresh that would set the stage for almost all of Apple's recent design. The product, the first piece of software overseen by Jony Ive, was confusing, amateur, and relatively unfinished upon launch. [...] It's almost as if the company is being buried under the weight of its products. Unable to cut ties with past concepts (for instance, the abomination that is iTunes), unable to choose clear paths forward (USB-C or Lightning guys?), compromising core elements to make room for splashy features, and executing haphazardly to solve long-term issues. [...] Pundits will respond to these arguments by detailing Apple's meteoric and sustained market-value gains. Apple fans will shout justifications for a stylus that must be charged by sticking it into the bottom of an iPad, a "back" button jammed weirdly into the status bar, a system of dongles for connecting oft-used devices, a notch that rudely juts into the display of a $1,000 phone. But the reality is that for all the phones Apple sells and for all the people who buy them, the company is stuck in idea-quicksand, like Microsoft in the early 2000s, or Apple in the 90s.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: You know what's coming tomorrow, you've known and waited for it for months now. Samsung's 2017 flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S8, will be officially announced, and one of the most critical periods in the company's history will begin. The phone Samsung launches on Wednesday will carry greater expectations and have to prove a lot more than usual. Even as the world's biggest smartphone maker, Samsung's mobile credibility was deeply shaken by the Galaxy Note 7 snafu, so it now needs to reassert its reliability while also rebooting its technological advantage. Vlad Savov provides a "rundown of the biggest challenges facing Samsung" in his report. While Samsung will need to nail the design and camera performance, as well as many other things, the most critical area will be the battery, given how the Note 7 was recalled due to battery issues. Even though that incident took place half a year ago, we are still faced with the consequences. Samsung is still trying to figure out what to do with the "recalled units" and people are still making bad jokes about "explosive Samsung news." If the Galaxy S8 is to have any battery issues whatsoever, the result could be catastrophic for the company. Though, Samsung is well aware of this and has likely packed "the most robust and durable batteries we've ever seen in a smartphone" inside the Galaxy S8 devices.

Last Thursday you had a chance to ask Linus Torvalds about programming, hardware, and all things Linux. You can read his answers to those questions below. If you'd like to see what he had to say the last time we sat down with him, you can do so here.