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Thursday, August 28th, 2014
| Time |
Event |
| 12:46a |
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 28, 2014
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 28, 2014 is available. | | 12:35p |
PHP 5.6.0 released The PHP 5.6.0 release is available. There's a number of new features, including constant scalar expressions, a new " ..." operator for both variadic functions and sequence unpacking, an exponentiation operator, an integrated interactive debugger, and more. See the PHP 5.6.0
migration guide for more information. | | 12:59p |
2014 Kernel OPW internship report Sarah Sharp has posted an
update on the kernel internships managed through the Outreach Program for Women, with an emphasis on what past participants are doing now. " Many people may be disappointed that those three OPW alumni aren’t
working on open source, but I’m overjoyed that these women have found jobs
in the technology sector. This fact is heartening to me because many of the
women that participate in OPW were working in retail before their
internship. To be able to move into the technology sector is a giant step
in the right direction, and I’m happy that the OPW program could be a part
of that." | | 2:38p |
Security updates for Thursday Debian has updated s3ql (code execution).
Mageia has updated x11vnc (code
execution).
openSUSE has updated phpMyAdmin
(13.1, 12.3: multiple vulnerabilities) and python3 (12.3: two vulnerabilities).
Ubuntu has updated squid3 (14.04,
12.04: denial of service). | | 8:58p |
5 UX Tips for Developers (Red Hat developer blog) On Red Hat's developer blog, Máirín Duffy has tips for developers on improving their application's user experience (UX). " Speaking of speeding things up for your users – one way you can do this is to limit the amount of choices users have to make while using your application. It’s you, my application developer friend, that users are relying on as an expert in the ways of whatever it is that your application does. Users trust you to make set sane defaults based on your domain expertise; when you set defaults, you are also alleviating users from having to make a choice that – depending on their level of expertise – may be quite hard for them to understand.
This isn’t to say you should eliminate all choices and configuration options from your application! Let users ease into it, though. Give them a good default so that your application requires less of them to start, and as they gain expertise and confidence in using your app over time, they can explore the preferences and change those settings based on their needs when they are ready." | | 9:10p |
Containers vs Hypervisors: The Battle Has Just Begun (Linux.com) Russell Pavlicek looks at the rivalry between containers and hypervisors over at Linux.com. He outlines the arguments for and against each, and follows it up with a description of a new contender for a "cloud operating system": unikernels. " Unikernel systems create tiny VMs. Mirage OS from the Xen Project incubator, for example, has created several network devices that run kilobytes in size (yes, that's “kilobytes” – when was the last time you heard of any VM under a megabyte?). They can get that small because the VM itself does not contain a general-purpose operating system per se, but rather a specially built piece of code that exposes only those operating system functions required by the application.
There is no multi-user operating environment, no shell scripts, and no massive library of utilities to take up room – or to subvert in some nefarious exploit. There is just enough code to make the application run, and precious little for a malefactor to leverage. And in unikernels like Mirage OS, all the code that is present is statically type-safe, from the applications stack all the way down to the device drivers themselves. It's not the “end-all be-all” of security, but it is certainly heading in the right direction." | | 9:57p |
Linux Foundation creates a new storage and filesystems conference: Vault The Linux Foundation has announced a new conference called " Vault" that will focus on storage and filesystems for Linux. It will be co-located with the annual invitation-only Linux Storage, Filesystem and Memory Management Summit and will be held March 11-12, 2015 at the Revere Hotel in Boston. " '90% of the world's data has been created in the last few years and most of that data is being stored and accessed via a Linux-based system,' said Linux Foundation Chief Marketing Officer Amanda McPherson. 'Now is the ideal time to bring the open source community together in this new forum, Vault, to collaborate on new methods of improving capacity, efficiency and security to manage the huge data volumes envisioned in the coming years. By bringing together the leading minds of Linux file systems and storage and our members who are pushing the limits of what is possible, Vault should expand the state of the art in Linux.'" |
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