HashiCorp surprised the open-source community when it announced it was changing Terraform’s license to the Business Source License. As a popular infrastructure-as-code DevOps solution, the licensing change had significant ramifications, leading The Linux Foundation to fork the project and create OpenTofu.

Oracle’s Terri Noyes, Product Management Director, outlined the change.

Our latest Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) Cloud Manager update, 24.1.1.1, is now available.

In this release, we have updated the versions of key Cloud Manager technology stack components to maintain security standards and improve supportability.

In addition, we have switched from using the Terraform infrastructure as code tool to OpenTofu. Note that this does not impact Cloud Manager functionality.

We highly recommend that you uptake this new 24.1.1.1 release of Cloud Manager at your earliest convenience.

Oracle’s adoption of OpenTofu is a major win for the fledgling project and a warning shot HashiCorp would do well to heed.

A whopping 96% of third-party cloud container apps have known vulnerabilities, highlighting ongoing cloud security challenges.

Cloud computing is often touted as more secure than traditional options. Unfortunately, this is only true if all parties involved make security a prime objective.

According to Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 team, some 96% of third-party container apps have known vulnerabilities. In addition, 63% of third-party code templates contain insecure configurations.

The news is especially concerning given the rise of supply chain attacks. Hackers are increasingly targeting widely used, third-party software, services, containers and plugins. Successfully compromising a single vendor who’s product is used by thousands of customers can have a far greater impact than compromising a single target.

Unit 42 highlights the danger of supply chain cloud attacks:

In most supply chain attacks, an attacker compromises a vendor and inserts malicious code in software used by customers. Cloud infrastructure can fall prey to a similar approach in which unvetted third-party code could introduce security flaws and give attackers access to sensitive data in the cloud environment. Additionally, unless organizations verify sources, third-party code can come from anyone, including an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT).

Organizations that want to stay secure must start making DevOps security a priority:

Teams continue to neglect DevOps security, due in part to lack of attention to supply chain threats. Cloud native applications have a long chain of dependencies, and those dependencies have dependences of their own. DevOps and security teams need to gain visibility into the bill of materials in every cloud workload in order to evaluate risk at every stage of the dependency chain and establish guardrails.

Rust is growing in popularity as a result of several key features and advantages the language provides. JetBrains already offers a plugin to enable Rust development in IntelliJ, but the company is going all-in on a dedicated IDE.

JetBrains says the new IDE will offer code completion, code generation, on-the-fly analysis and fixes, as well as smart refactoring and live templates.

RustRover allows you to write code faster by completing relevant names everywhere in your code, adding details such as missing fields, imports, or trait methods, and generating typical constructs with live templates.

While you type, RustRover applies a set of inspections to your code and suggests quick-fixes to resolve any problems automatically. RustRover offers many refactorings that work across the whole codebase.

The new IDE is available as a preview.

Actual is a unique finance app, one that focuses on privacy and giving users control over their own data. The app is available for Linux, macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, and the web.

Actual is a super fast privacy-focused app for managing your finances. You own your data, and we will sync it across all devices with optional end-to-end encryption.

Unfortunately, despite positive reviews and significant paid subscriptions, Long says the challenges involved have made it nearly impossible to continue developing the project alone.

Building products is hard, building a business is even harder. I told myself that I was going to push through and make it happen no matter what. Even if it took years, I would slowly build my vision. When I stopped working full-time on Actual and started working at Stripe, I told everyone it wasn’t going anywhere. And I meant it.

But the fact is this project is way bigger than me. I have to come to accept that. Even I were completely full-time, I need to hire at least 2 other people to properly sustain it. It’s time to call it for what it is and open it up as a community project.

Long’s challenges were exacerbated by his focus on making Actual privacy-respecting, instead of going the cloud-first route that so many other apps and services choose.

Actual is a very different product. It’s not a normal SaaS app. It’s a local-first app using a fancy technology called CRDTs that syncs changes across devices.

This has a lot of benefits, but one drawback is I can’t use off-the-shelf solutions anymore. Hiring and getting help is harder. I’m super proud of being so ambitious, but ultimately doing something so different made it hard to iterate quickly. I can’t simply make a quick database schema change. Every feature needs to be rolled out very thoughfully and maintain backwards compatibility.

I’m hopeful that open-source will make this easier; with lots of people involved it offsets the difficulty added. And I’m hopeful there will a lot of people involved because I get asked if I’m going to open-source at least once a month.

Long’s challenges are a sad commentary on the state of the current tech and software industry, where innovative products struggle to gain traction because the rest of the industry is geared toward a cloud-first approach where users give up control over their data.

Hopefully, Actual will receive the backing it needs from the open-source community to continue evolving.

Selig created the popular Apollo Reddit client, widely considered to be one of the best third-party Reddit apps available. Unfortunately, Selig had to shut Apollo down after Reddit’s controversial API pricing made it impossible to carry on.

Selig has taken to X to announce his latest endeavor, Language Pal, an iOS widget to help users learn a language.

Introducing Language Pal, easily learn languages right on your iOS Home Screen, no opening apps needed! Available now (for free!) in Pixel Pals!

Christian Selig (@Christian Selig) — October 18, 2023

If you are wondering if a fixed methodology will help you upscale your business efficiency, then you are living in a myth. A systematic approach needs to be followed to boost the performance of your existing software solution. The software development life cycle, or the SDLC, is a predefined methodology that perfectly aligns with any business. The SDLC process enables the developers to address the product development process in a structured manner while ensuring timely delivery and cost-effectiveness. 

Following the SDLC process for developing enterprise applications, the monitoring system is segregated into 7 stages that must be followed in a specific order. This step-by-step approach helps enterprises build software applications and predict the exact project completion time. This blog aims to discuss the 7 vital stages of enterprise software development through SDLC.

7 Stages of Enterprise App Development 

Enterprise app development is a complicated process that involves a few stages that need to be followed in order. The following are the vital stages of enterprise app development:

1. Project Planning 

What a client actually wants is the primary focus of the initial stage of the enterprise software development lifecycle stage. Project planning is a crucial component of the entire software delivery lifecycle because this is when the team establishes the requirements of the new product and estimates the cost. Making a thorough project plan will assist you in selecting the programming language and development tools that will best contribute to the creation of the product.

2. Analysis Requirement

After completing the requirement-gathering process, the next stage is to examine the gaps in the development process for enterprise software. If there are any flaws in this procedure, they will be fixed right now.

The above-mentioned deliverable from the first stage of enterprise software development is considered in the second step. A document known as an SRS, or software requirement specification, is created as a reference for how to handle all the small nuances unique to enterprise software.

3. Product Design 

Designing products is the main focus of this phase, which involves product architects and developers who create and propose numerous design approaches, all of which are recorded in a Design Document Specification (DDS). Its accuracy is essential for the ensuing production phase (Stage 4), as developers largely rely on the DDS as their major code reference. 

In order to make sure the design properly handles anticipated problems and protects the team from potential challenges and risks, it is also crucial to reference the Stage 2 Software Requirements Specification (SRS).

4. Coding or Software Development

At this point, the coding process begins. Despite being the longest stage of the SDLC, this one is easier than the first two. Project managers and back-end and front-end developers are currently involved. They allocate tasks to developers based on their skill levels and lay out the implementation schedule. 

Back-end developers build the server side of the program, the databases where all data will be saved, the API, the code to communicate with a database, libraries, and data architectures, whilst front-end developers design the solution’s user interface for efficient communication with the server.

5. Testing 

Immediately following the completion of the enterprise app development process, a new set of crucial stages entered the picture. Following this post-development phase, there are stages of augmentation where the created product is reviewed, tested, and used.

In order to test the applications, there are many different sorts of testing techniques that can be used. This includes unit, code, integration, functional, and security testing.

6. Deployment

During this phase, a software product is released for user testing. The actions taken to install, configure, launch, and test new hardware or software in its environment are referred to as “deployment” procedures. To determine whether the software complies with all SRS standards, analysts and users can evaluate it or particular released aspects. If the customer is satisfied, the product is made to work.

7. Monitoring and Support 

The software needs to be regularly checked after a successful launch to guarantee flawless operation. Due to the fact that there is always potential for improvement, the software can be updated and changed in response to user feedback. Regular inspections will also reveal any software flaws and bugs that may be impairing the program’s functionality. 

Wrapping it Up

Although there isn’t a single method for developing enterprise applications, most procedures include the crucial elements listed above in some way. Thus, it is essential to comprehend them. The software development life cycle offers a methodical framework for carefully planning, creating, coding, and testing enterprise applications. It emphasizes the necessity of careful preparation and effective execution to guarantee the development process’s success.

AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud dominate the industry, accounting for a 71% share of the market. Similarly, the three companies account for 65% of all cloud spending. Nonetheless, it appears some organizations are looking to support smaller, independent rivals.

A new report, commissioned by Linode and conducted by Techstrong Research, shows that despite 93% of respondents using one of the Big Three, two-thirds would consider an alternative.

The largest three hyperscalers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Compute) are used by 93% of respondents. Yet many DevOps buyers are re-thinking a reflex default to these hyperscalers. Two-thirds of companies surveyed would consider bringing in an “alternative” CSP; almost 22% have already done so. In fact, the combined market share for the top alternative vendors is fourth in the category, just behind Microsoft and Google.

Even more troubling for the Big Three is the growing interest in alternative providers, as well as the reasons that interest is growing.

Interest and adoption is highest in small and medium organizations (fewer than 10,000 employees). Main reasons for bringing in a new vendor include reducing reliance on a single provider, improving price performance and ease of use, and better data protection.

Another growing concern is competition from a company’s cloud service provider (CSP). Each of the Big Three are part of larger companies that offer a wide array of products and services, many of which can compete with the products and services of their cloud customers.

More than 50% of DevOps professionals and leaders surveyed say their CSP is already a competitor to their B2B or B2C business or is expected to become one. Fear of IP loss and rapid market displacement is also evidenced in respondent’s strong stated desire to work with a trustworthy, capable provider who shares their company values.

Needless to say, the Big Three hold a commanding position in the market, and it will be a long time before they face a serious challenge. Nonetheless, the report should be a cause for concern and highlights areas where they must improve in order to keep their customers happy.

Spotlight the growing demand for software solutions throughout various industries and how this has led to a surge in the software designing market. Also, provide an explanation for why it’s integral for readers to seek expert insights while navigating this giant landscape.

Understanding Software Development

The Software Development Lifecycle

This section delves into the software development lifecycle (SDLC), the procedure software goes via from theory to transport. Provide an explanation for the importance of thing degrees of SDLC, along with requirements amassing, format, development, trying out, deployment, and maintenance. Spotlight the importance of understanding this lifecycle for making informed selections approximately software development projects.

Types of Software Development Projects

Net application improvement

Talk about the specifics of internet software improvement, including creating software on net browsers. Provide an explanation for the particular challenges and issues in internet app development, together with consumer interface format, browser compatibility, and scalability.

mobile App improvement

intricate on mobile app improvement, specializing in creating packages for smartphones and pills. Talk about the differences between iOS and Android improvement, the importance of responsive design, and user reveal issues in the cell space.

corporation software improvement

creating software solutions for massive companies. Speak about scalability, safety, integration challenges in this context, and customization during the whole process. Emphasize the role of customization and versatility in organization software programs.

Choosing the Right Software Development Company

Developing the platform to cater to niche markets can significantly boost its success. Thus, it is always important to opt for the right software development company that allows total access to customize the app during the whole process of designing. 

Defining Your Project Requirements

Guide readers on the way to define their software program venture necessities effectively. Discuss the importance of clear, precise specifications and the way this step units the inspiration for a successful mission.

Evaluating Development Expertise

Programming Languages and Technology

Explain the importance of comparing an improvement corporation’s talent in numerous programming languages and technologies. Talk about how the selection of generation impacts challenge consequences and how to align generation with project goals.

Industry Knowledge

highlight the importance of industry-particular experience. Provide an explanation for why hiring a business enterprise with understanding within the reader’s industry can be fantastic. Speak case research or examples of enterprise-particular tasks.

Assessing Portfolio and Case Studies

Manual readers on effectively reviewing an enterprise’s portfolio and case research. Explain what to search for in past initiatives, which include undertaking variety, complexity, and hit effects. Emphasize the significance of soliciting references and accomplishing due diligence.

Budgeting and Cost Considerations

Establishing a Realistic Budget

Speak the stairs in placing realistic finances for a software development assignment. Highlight factors like task scope, complexity, and ongoing renovation expenses. Offer hints on budget estimation and value control.

Transparency in Pricing

Emphasize the significance of obvious pricing models. Speak distinct pricing systems inside the software improvement enterprise, including fixed-price, time and materials, and fee-based totally pricing. Advocate readers on how to negotiate pricing effectively.

Read more:– How To Maintain Your Company Culture When Hiring Abroad

Hidden Fees to Watch Out For

spotlight common hidden costs readers should know, which include post-launch help, upkeep, and 0.33-birthday celebration integrations. Offer suggestions on figuring out and mitigating these costs at some stage in the mission planning phase.

Project Management and Communication

Agile vs. Waterfall Approach

Evaluate and compare the Agile and Waterfall mission management methodologies. Give an explanation for the advantages and drawbacks of each approach and how to pick the one that aligns with the challenge’s goals and constraints.

powerful verbal exchange Channels

speak the importance of communication in software improvement initiatives. Provide an explanation for numerous conversation channels, together with venture control tools, meetings, and collaboration structures. Emphasize the want for clear and common conversation to ensure task success.

Project Tracking and Reporting

Provide an explanation for the significance of project tracking and reporting. Discuss gear and techniques for monitoring project development, figuring out bottlenecks, and making timely modifications. Spotlight the function of undertaking managers in making sure on-time and on-budget delivery.

Quality Assurance and Testing

Importance of Quality Testing

Emphasize the necessary function of great warranty (QA) and try it out in software program development. Discuss how quality testing guarantees the final product meets high-quality requirements and personal expectations. Mention the results of inadequate checking out.

QA approaches and Methodologies

Explain one-of-a-kind QA strategies and methodologies, which include guide testing, computerized trying out, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD). Talk whilst using every approach and its benefits.

Check automation and guide trying out

Dive deeper into the choice between test automation and manual testing. Talk situations wherein check automation is value-powerful and when manual testing is extra appropriate. Highlight exceptional practices for both processes.

Scaling Your Project

Scalability Considerations

Speak about the importance of scalability in software program development. Give an explanation for how scalability concerns ought to be integrated into the preliminary assignment-making plans phase. Complex the factors affecting scalability, including improved user masses, data volume, and concurrent transactions. Provide examples of hit scaling techniques and their impact on agencies.

including New Features and Modules

Explain the importance of being able to upload new functions and modules in your software program in a bendy process. Speak about how modular architecture allows for less difficult updates and improvements. Offer insights into first-rate practices for modular layout and application programming interfaces (APIs) for extending functionality.

future-Proofing Your Software

manual readers on destiny-proofing their software program answers. Discuss how technology evolves and the need to expect modifications. Provide guidelines on staying current with industry traits, adopting adaptable architectures, and planning for ordinary updates to ensure that the software remains applicable and competitive.

Read more:– Online Tools for New Business Registration

Offshore vs. Onshore Development

Pros and Cons of Offshore Improvement

talk about the advantages and drawbacks of offshore software program improvement. Give an explanation for how offshore improvement may be value-powerful as a result of lower hard work costs; however, it may contain challenges associated with conversation, time sector variations, and cultural nuances. Provide examples of successful offshore development tasks and not unusual pitfalls to avoid.

Blessings of Onshore development

Spotlight the benefits of onshore software program development. Give an explanation for how operating with nearby improvement teams can cause higher conversation, reduced cultural barriers, and simpler collaboration. Discuss the blessings of onshore improvement concerning best control and intellectual property safety.

Hybrid strategies

Introduce the idea of hybrid improvement procedures, which combine offshore and onshore improvement factors. Discuss situations where hybrid procedures may be high-quality, together with leveraging offshore groups for price-effective tasks even as preserving crucial components onshore. Guide a way to efficiently manage hybrid development teams and make certain seamless integration.

Evaluating Customer Support

Post-release assist and preservation

Explain the importance of post-launch aid and maintenance for software tasks. Speak how ongoing help ensures the software program remains operational, impenetrable, and up to date. Provide insights into setting up carrier degree agreements (SLAs) and the function of devoted aid groups.

handling worm Fixes and Updates

guide readers on how to manage computer virus fixes and updates successfully. Talk about the want for regular software program updates to deal with safety vulnerabilities and improve performance. Provide an explanation for how to prioritize and schedule updates and the significance of trying out updates before deployment.

customer support nice

highlight the significance of incredible customer support in software development. Speak about how responsive and beneficial customer service can boost customer delight and loyalty. Provide examples of agencies with fantastic customer support inside the software program development industry and how it definitely affects their reputation.

By way of elaborating on these subjects, you may provide readers with a better appreciation of the issues and choices they want to make while scaling their software projects, deciding on offshore and onshore improvement, and making sure of excellent customer service for the duration of the software program’s lifecycle.

Closing Remarks

Navigating the arena of software program development groups is a multi-faceted journey that needs careful consideration and expert insights. By grasping the nuances of software program development lifecycles, making knowledgeable picks about improvement companions, coping with budgets, and prioritizing great and help, individuals and businesses can hopefully embark on successful software program tasks.

Unlike on-premise infrastructure, most cloud providers use a pay-as-you-go model, allowing for a low barrier-to-entry and easy scalability. Unfortunately, that model can also lead to significant challenges accurately predicting how much cloud computing will ultimately cost.

According to Anodot’s State of Cloud Cost Report, almost 50% of IT executives say it’s proving difficult to control cloud costs, while respondents say that gaining visibility and understanding both usage and costs is a top challenge. Similarly, 88% cite optimization and reduced spending on existing cloud deployments as extremely or very important.

Interestingly, despite these concerns, 60% of those polled plan to migrate more workloads to the cloud in the coming year.

Anadot highlights the importance of organizations carefully tracking their cloud usage to better understand their needs and associated costs:

Unless costs are managed carefully, it’s quite easy to lose track of what’s being used—especially for organizations with large development teams that move quickly and tend to try new things. Misconfigurations, over-provisioning, and forgotten resources that have been provisioned but abandoned are the bane of cost management for DevOps teams. Unfortunately, for many organizations, the surprise costs only show up when the monthly invoice arrives.

Understanding cloud cost visibility is not a new challenge. In fact, AWS recently took steps to lower customers’ bills following years of complaints and a reputation for surprise bills, artificially high fees, and hidden costs.

With 60% of organizations planning to increase their cloud deployments, cost visibility is something that will need to be addressed sooner rather than later.

GitLab is a leading cloud-based development and code-sharing platform. According to The Register, the company plans to start removing dormant projects from free accounts to save on hosting costs.

According to the report, the auto-delete option could save the company up to $1 million a year. The Register’s sources indicated GitLab knows the potential minefield deleting projects could turn into and will give users weeks or months to save their work or move to paid accounts. Evidently, a single commit, comment, or issue within the previous 12 months is enough to keep a project “active.”

Needless to say, the news is already not going over well with those in the software development community.

“Source code does not take up much disk space,” Geoff Huntley, an open-source advocate, told The Register. “For someone to delete all that code is destruction of the community. They are going to destroy their brand and goodwill.”

“People host their code there because there is this idea it will be available to the general public to reuse and remix,” he added. “Of course there are no guarantees it will always be hosted there, but the unwritten rules in open source are that you make the code available and you don’t remove it.”

“We have had maintainers pull code and there has been huge community outrage about it,” he said,

Only time will tell if GitLab will go through with its plans, but the backlash should certainly give the company much to consider.

The Linux world is in the midst of a transition from the old X11 display server to the newer Wayland protocol. At the same time, KDE is transitioning the Plasma desktop environment (DE) and apps to version 6 of the underlying Qt toolkit.

Together, these changes are providing a unique opportunity for KDE developers to build in seamless crash recovery when the display server crashes, as Edmundson explains in his blog:

Right now if you restart pulseaudio your sound might cut out, restart NetworkManager and you lose your wifi, restart an X11 window manager and your decorations disappear.

But within a second it’s all back to normal exactly where you left off with everything recovering fine.

This isn’t true for display servers. If X11 restarts you’re back at the login prompt. All drafts lost, games unsaved, work wasted.

Edmundson details how QtWayland 6.6 provides a way to overcome this issue:

The solution for this? Instead of exiting when the compositor closes, simply…don’t!

If we could connect to a new compositor we just need to send the right amount of information to bring it in sync and notify the application code of any changes to bring this in sync.

For Qt applications all this information is handled in the backend, in the Wayland Qt Platform Abstraction (QPA).

Qt already has to handle screens and input devices being removed, clipboards being revoked and drag and drops cancelled. Supporting a whole reset isn’t introducing any new work, we just have to trigger all of these actions at once, then reconnect to the newly restored compositor and restore our contents.

Applications already have to support all of these events too as well as handle callbacks to redraw buffers. There’s no changes needed at an application code level, it’s all done as transparently as possible.

Edmundson says there are other potential benefits down the road, including the ability to seamlessly perform updates in place that would normally require logging out and back in.

The KDE developers are also upstreaming these changes so other toolkits can use them, with “pending patches for GTK, SDL and even XWayland, with key parts of SDL merged but disabled already.”

The feature is a significant improvement for the Linux desktop and will hopefully be widely adopted across desktops and distributions.

Some were taken by surprise at the announcement of a new iteration of Windows. Microsoft claimed back in 2015 that Windows 10 would be the last revision of the operating system. At the time, the plan was to release regular updates that would keep the software secure, functional, and up to date as computing evolved.

Plans clearly changed, and incremental updates were clearly insufficient to keep Windows at the forefront of residential and commercial computer use. There’s also the significant importance of Windows to the company’s bottom line. More than 16% of Microsoft’s revenue comes from Windows, and free updates would never go down well with the finance department.

Considering that Microsoft is also heavily involved with gaming through its Xbox consoles and corporate social networking following the acquisition of LinkedIn, the fact that Windows exceeds both revenues combined meant that a new version of the flagship operating system was all but inevitable.

New Windows releases rarely pass without controversy. Outside of specific releases like Windows Vista, most complaints stem from familiarity. More so than any other piece of software, people see and interact with their operating systems every day. When something isn’t where they’re used to, the obvious reaction is one of complaint.

Finances aside, the decision to create Windows 11 cannot have been an easy one. With an employee on record saying that a new release would never happen, a follow-up to Windows 10 would represent a U-turn at best.

Fortunately, Microsoft appears intent on making Windows 11 fresh and feature-packed. Much more than an incremental release, this seems to be a genuine effort to upgrade what is now a six-year-old operating system into something genuinely new.

The Highlights

From what we’ve seen so far, the computing giant is focused on remote working and cross-platform support. During the pandemic, Microsoft Teams went from an unused inclusion in Office packages to a critical meeting tool for teams of all sizes. The meeting and collaboration tool won’t just receive a facelift with the launch of Windows 11. It will become an integral part of the operating system, with direct and easy access from the taskbar itself.

The failed efforts at creating Windows Phones – Microsoft sold off its Nokia subsidiary shortly after Windows 10’s release – has pushed Microsoft supporters towards Android. Just as most new Xbox releases can be played on Windows PCs as things stand today, Windows 11 is set to boast full support for Android apps.

The eternal battles between Windows and macOS continue, with some observers claiming that the new look of Windows 11 brings it more closely in line with Apple’s operating system. However, given that the company is renowned for clean design and superior functionality, that could prove a wise decision.

How Much Will Windows 11 Cost?

Long-time Windows users will remember the days of activating products online and desperately scrambling around for product keys when using a new PC. Today, most Microsoft users will already have a Windows 10 key attached to their Microsoft accounts. So switching to different hardware is as simple as logging into that account, at which point Windows is fully active and ready to use.

Microsoft famously encouraged as many people as possible to make a move to Windows 10. As a result, the upgrade to the tenth iteration was completely free outside of particularly old versions or those that had never used Windows before.

The good news is that Windows 11 looks set to follow a similar pattern. As a result, Windows 10 owners will be entitled to a free upgrade to the next iteration.

So what does that mean to Microsoft’s Windows revenue?

The new upgrade appears to follow a freemium model. The ever-divisive Microsoft Store will take pride of place in the latest release. It’s well known that Apple makes more from the App Store than it does from the hardware that relies on it. Microsoft seemingly wants to do something similar.

The overhauled Microsoft Store won’t be exclusive to Windows 11 – those that opt against upgrading will find the same experience on Windows 10. Nevertheless, the new version is designed for incredible speed, a more comprehensive selection of apps, and improved usability.

This won’t be the first time Microsoft has sought to position itself as a one-stop-shop for all the software anyone could ever need. However, with close Xbox integration, a suite of essential products such as Office, and a slew of acquisitions, the new store stands a better chance of success than anything that has come before.

The free upgrade means that consumer appetite is set to be exceptionally high. Windows 10, with a similar upgrade path, captured 75 million users within four weeks of launch.

There’s no reason why Windows 11 cannot become the de facto standard for consumer PCs. However, businesses are a different story, as they often are, with internal testing and reliance on older infrastructure often delaying significant software upgrades.

Most consumers will hope for another Windows 10 success story with its successor rather than a Windows Me abomination – widely regarded as the worst Windows release of all time. Reception among Insiders has been positive so far, and so there are plenty of reasons to be excited about what Microsoft has in store later this year.

Prosus has announced it is buying Stack Overflow for $1.8 billion, as it increases its focus on the online learning market.

Prosus is a consumer internet group that has investments in the online classifieds, education technology, food delivery and payments and fintech markets. The company is the largest shareholder of Tencent Holdings, the Chinese company behind some of the biggest games, including Fortnite, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Call of Duty: Mobile and Ring of Elysium.

Prosus appears to be making a major move in the online education market with the acquisition of Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is one of the top 50 websites in the world, with an extremely active user base. In fact, 85% of the site’s community visits every week to access the 52+ million questions and answers, most about programming and development.

“We are delighted to be welcoming Stack Overflow to the Prosus family as we increasingly focus on the future of workplace learning,” Larry Illg, CEO of EdTech at Prosus, said. “Learning of any kind typically begins with a question and their platform is critically important for global developers when they have questions about their work. There is an opportunity to connect more deeply with their community through our other education platforms to further fulfill their learning needs.

“With enduring skills shortages and ever-evolving needs within technology organizations, technology training has emerged as the largest and fastest growing segment of corporate learning and development,” Illg continued. “As an operator of businesses across 90+ countries, we understand the needs of technologists and developers, particularly in high-growth markets. In addition to further scaling its community in the markets we know well, we want to help Stack Overflow Teams to expand within enterprises to address an underserved opportunity to transform their technology learning and collaboration.”

“We are excited to be joining the Prosus family, which catapults us into a new phase of growth and allows us to expand and accelerate Stack Overflow’s impact around the world,” Stack Overflow’s CEO, Prashanth Chandrasekar, said. “Prosus’s expertise growing and nurturing communities, especially in a global context, will make our public platform even more invaluable in helping developers and technologists learn and grow. Given Prosus’s focus on the future of the workplace, their partnership will allow our market leading SaaS collaboration product, Stack Overflow for Teams, to reach thousands more global enterprises, allowing them to accelerate product innovation and increase productivity by unlocking institutional knowledge.”

The deal is expected to close in Q3 2021.

Goldman Sachs has added Microsoft to its “Conviction List,” touting “sustained double-digit” revenue growth.

Microsoft is currently the second-place cloud company, behind AWS. Nonetheless, the company is seen as being in a particularly strong position, thanks to its legacy business and potential to help its clients move to the cloud.

According to Business Insider, Goldman Sachs is now calling for a $315 price target on Microsoft’s stock, a 38% increase over Monday’s close. Goldman highlighted the company’s cloud potential, saying Microsoft is “well-positioned to capitalize on a number of long-term secular trends, including public cloud and SaaS adoption, digital transformation, AI/ML, BI/analytics, and DevOps (amongst others).”

Microsoft has been one of the biggest winners during the pandemic, with a majority of polled companies planning on increasing their Azure and Microsoft SaaS spending. In fact, a higher percentage of respondents planned on increasing their spending on Microsoft, as opposed to those planning on increasing their AWS spending.

Wedbush recently raised their own target from $260 to $270, while acknowledging a bull-case possibility of $300 a share. It appears Goldman Sachs is a even more bullish with their $315 target.

COVID Has Really Impacted Aerospace… and the Air Force

COVID has really impacted the aerospace industry in this nation and nations around the world disproportionately to other industries. The Air Force has not been exempt from these impacts. We have had to go into a wartime posture and engage with exceptional authorities and funding to keep the aerospace industry, which allows us to go to war, whole.

But aside from the crisis response that we’ve all been in it’s forced us to do some serious reflection about how we engage with production and supply chains going forward. How does the Air Force need to change the way it views its future self so that we’re not just more ready for a crisis when it occurs but we’re actually designing better systems, doing better engineering, and using technology more effectively? Systems that we need to go to war are going to be hidden behind doors where their vulnerabilities are never going to be exposed because of secrecy.

Secrecy Hinders Our Ability To Digitally Go To War

We’re moving into an era where we’re leveraging commercial technology more frequently. Because of that, we can no longer hope that secrecy, keeping our systems classified, will be the sole means for us to be secure. We need to find a new paradigm where openness is also part of our security posture. Now we’re not going to be able to copy commercial industry one for one. Our systems in many cases don’t have a commercial analog. We can’t quickly replace them.

We’re not in a competition where spirals occur in years. Many of our aerospace breakthroughs, especially those in technologies like stealth, take time to do. Secrecy is going to continue to be part of the equation. But secrecy can’t be the catch-all approach to how we ensure systems are able to digitally go to war and be ready to fight in a cyber environment against an adversary as capable as we are.

Containerization Solves The Secrecy Problem

The software development capabilities that technologies like Kubernetes or containerization and Istio bring in to the Air Force. It’s amazing that companies like Google that have now transitioned this to an open-source driven initiative have solved a lot of what we would have to solve as a military. How do you write code in a development environment, in that tech stack that may also represent the physical aspects of your system, but it certainly represents the software components?

How do you go from your development environment out to the edge securely and know your code will run the same way. Containerization solves that problem for us. The military is behind and adopting it. It’s not old but this technology is moving through industry as fast as Linux did. If we don’t get off the dime we will be left behind. Keep pushing the Air Force and Space Force on this. Do not let us get comfortable.

The French military has been granted permission to develop augmented troops by an ethics committee tasked with evaluating the issue.

Bionic humans, augmented with technology, have been a major feature of science fiction for decades. The Six Million Dollar Man was a popular TV show about a USAF Colonel given bionic limbs, implants and abilities following a test flight crash.

While many prosthetics focus on restoring lost functionality, technology is reaching the point where such prosthetics may go beyond restoration, squarely into the realm of improvement. High-tech prosthetics may be able to enhance a soldier’s strength, cognition, speed and more, not to mention offer built-in connectivity and other electronic abilities. Augments could even help a soldier deal with pain from injuries, or resist enhanced interrogation.

According to CNN, French armed forces minister Florence Parly ruled out any “invasive” augmentations. The ethics committee also ruled out any modifications that inhibit a soldier’s ability to control their own strength, or anything that desensitizes their “humanity.”

Much of France’s approach seems geared more toward keeping pace with potential threats than wholesale adoption.

“But we have to be clear, not everyone has the same scruples as us and we have to prepare ourselves for such a future,” Parly said in a press release.

According to WalkingCat on Twitter, a Surface engineering webinar says that security is the main reason for both features being missing from Surface tablets and laptops.

The engineer says that removable RAM poses a threat since an individual could freeze it with liquid nitrogen, remove it and then put it in a memory reader and access all the contents that were stored in memory. Similarly, because Thunderbolt is “a direct memory access port,” Microsoft does not include it over concerns someone could use a memory stick plugged into the port to gain direct access to the device’s memory, bypassing the OS and security.

The Verge was able to verify the authenticity of the leaked presentation, as well as the fact that the person narrating it is a 10+ year Microsoft veteran. Even so, as The Verge point out, it’s still surprising to hear Microsoft blaming security as the reason for not including Thunderbolt, especially since virtually every other major manufacturer deems it safe enough to include in their business-oriented machines.

A long-standing rule of computer security is that once physical access has been achieved, all bets are off. Most computer security focuses on keeping bad actors from gaining remote access. In contrast, once a device physically falls into a bad actor’s hands, aside from full-disk encryption, there’s virtually nothing to prevent them from eventually gaining access to what’s on the disk. As a result, Microsoft’s reason seems like a pointless, and possibly self-serving, justification.

Forsgren made the announcement on her website, saying she would be GitHub’s new VP of Research & Strategy. Forsgren was previously co-founder and CEO of DORA before it was acquired by Google. She is also the writer of the award-winning book Accelerate. Now Forsgren is taking her expertise in DevOps to GitHub.

“Looking to the future, there are more and different questions I want to ask, and this move is the perfect opportunity for that,” writes Forsgren. “At GitHub, I will expand and continue investigating developer happiness and productivity while also helping the industry get better, and there’s no better place to ask these questions because GitHub is truly at the heart of software development for so many communities. Here, I can bring the research closer to the tools that we use and build on the foundation of knowledge that exists while asking different questions, from different angles, and surfacing different insights. I am excited to continue talking with and learning from developers, testers, IT ops, infosec, and executives to understand their work; working with tools teams across the ecosystem to understand their challenges and what they see so we can help make things better; nerding out with researchers and makers across the industry and academia so we can partner to find interesting questions (and ways to ask and frame and think about those questions), supporting each other and collaborating on solutions.”

Bringing Forsgren onboard is a big win for Microsoft and GitHub. The talent, experience and expertise she brings will likely result in significant improvements to the developer community.

iOS 13, as well as iPadOS 13, includes a plethora of new features, such as Dark Mode, improved Photos and Camera, increased privacy, improved Siri, QuickPath keyboard and much more. On the iPad, iPadOS includes improved multi-tasking, external storage support and goes a long way toward making the iPad a full laptop replacement.

Along with the new features, however, as come a far greater number of bugs. Apple has had to release a quick succession of patches and updates to address security flaws, performance issues, connectivity problems and missing features. Bloomberg’s report indicates the iOS 13 testing program was a mess, leading to the buggy release. Some teams would add features on a daily basis without properly testing them, while others would update weekly. The end result was test builds that testers could not even use in some cases—due to the number of broken features—undermining the entire purpose of a test program.

The new testing guidelines call for buggy or incomplete features to be disabled in test builds moving forward, with testers having the ability to manually enable them if they so desire. This will ensure testers are able to properly evaluate usable new features, rather than being hampered by unfinished ones.

This change should be a welcome one to developers, testers and users alike. If Apple is able to release a solid, relatively bug-free iOS 14 as a result of the changes, it should go a long way toward regaining some of the trust that iOS 13 eroded.

Facebook is reportedly preparing its attack on the home electronics front by launching a home video chat device later this year. Reports say that the upcoming gadget will be named Portal, a product that is similar to Amazon’s Echo Show. If reports are correct, this new device will also be competing against similar home-based devices from Google and Apple.

Facebook will launch the product by May of 2018, according to online news site Cheddar. The launch date is slated to coincide with the company’s developer conference.

#Facebook set to move into the home device market and compete with Amazon Echo with video chat product, Portal https://t.co/32WgT5dsivpic.twitter.com/i9JWQXqJ7a

— Somo (@somoglobal) January 9, 2018

Incidentally, Facebook announced early this week that it is pulling out from the digital assistant market. The company will be shutting down M, it’s AI-powered concierge service that was previously positioned as a competitor to Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa.

Despite abandoning the digital assistant niche, Facebook is not yet giving up on the home-based smart electronics segment. To help it launch the upcoming Portal, the company is betting on its partnerships with Spotify and Netflix for content. Facebook has likewise inked a music licensing agreement with both Sony/ATV and Universal Music Group.

In addition, Facebook is marketing the upcoming product a little bit differently than existing gadgets. Portal’s thrust will be on the communication and video calls side of things. This differentiates it from the voice-assisted controls and AI capability of devices like Echo, Alexa or Siri.

#CheddarScoops Exclusive: Facebook is diving into the home device market with a video chat product named “Portal” that is expected to cost $499. #CheddarLIVE $FB pic.twitter.com/kFd3aherB4

— Cheddar (@cheddar) January 9, 2018

While it may not be Facebook’s first venture into hardware, there are doubts that the company has what it takes to successfully launch the upcoming gadget. Back in 2013, it launched its first hardware—HTC First aka as the Facebook phone—but it was a failure in the market.

There are also concerns that the rumored Portal may not be competitively priced. Facebook plans to price the gadget at $499, which is too hefty when compared to similar products such as the Echo Show, which is currently selling for only $229.99.

At the moment, Facebook declined to comment on the issue.

[Featured image via YouTube]