Michael G

Introducing Anonym: Raising the Bar for Privacy-Preserving Digital Advertising

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Mozilla has acquired Anonym, a trailblazer in privacy-preserving digital advertising. This strategic acquisition enables Mozilla to help raise the bar for the advertising industry by ensuring user privacy while delivering effective advertising solutions. The online advertising industry is undergoing a significant transformation. With growing consumer concerns and increasing scrutiny from regulators, it’s evident that current […]

The post Introducing Anonym: Raising the Bar for Privacy-Preserving Digital Advertising appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Greg Casamento: Keysight laid me off in January!

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A little history first. Keysight is a large company that, primarily, makes testing equipment such as oscilloscopes and other electronics. They bought a company a few years back named TestPlant. Prior to that, TestPlant bought a company by the name of Redstone that produced a product known as Eggplant. Recently, I was laid off for economic reasons (at least that’s what they said). It occurs to me that nothing in this world lasts forever. I was so depressed when I was let go because Keysight was the perfect home for me… they used GNUstep deeply. So, as you can imagine, I was deeply upset when things ended… but all things do. 

 I think it happened for several reasons: 

  • Economic – This is what was explained to me, but I am not sure I believe it 
  • Politics – I think this part is because I expressed my opinions HONESTLY about the direction of the company given that they wanted to make the application into a VSCode plugin.
  • Perception – I am 54 years old… so I think that they believed that Objective-C was my one and only talent, it’s not… I know many other languages and have many other skills. 

Unfortunately, in the US, any employer can let go of any employee or contractor for ANY reason. This is known as at-will employment, making it very hard to take any action against any employer (not that this is something I considered).

Keysight is and will remain a major contributor to GNUstep.
That being said, I recently ran into something rather disturbing at another company.   I have been working with a company based out of New Mexico that is interested in space applications.  They have been using GNUstep and have been awaiting funding.
The lead of this effort expressed something during a meeting saying “We will work on the GNUstep side of this because there is no reason we should have to pay for any of this.”   This hit a sour note with me to say the very least.   As it turns out he was under the mistaken impression that, because the work was on GNUstep, it was for free… which is WRONG.
I wonder if the same impression was present at Keysight or if other companies believe this.  The saying, according to RMS, is “Free as in freedom, not as in beer.”   If you are a manager at a company who is under the mistaken impression that work on any Free Software or Open Source project is free when your product depends on it, please correct your thinking.   Just because it is someone’s passion project does NOT mean that they are going to do that work for free and prioritize the things that need to be done for your organization.
All of that being said the positive sides are this:
  1. More time to code on GNUstep without interruption
  2. More time to work on my own projects
  3. Time to rest and relax
So, as much as I hate being unemployed there ARE some upsides to it.  Here’s to hoping something works out soon.   I literally loved my job at Keysight and, honestly, hope to return.   I have my eye on their changes as well as those of others just like any other member of the community.  Yours, GC

StreamOS source code republished 15 years later

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Way, way, way back in 2009, we reported on a small hobby operating system called StreamOS – version 0.21-RC1 had just been released that day. StreamOS was a 32-bit operating system written in Object Pascal using the Free Pascal Compiler, running on top of FreeDOS. It turns out that its creator, Oleksandr Natalenko (yes, the same person), recovered the old code, and republished it on Codeberg for posterity. It’s not a complete history, rather a couple of larger breadcrumbs stuck together with git. I didn’t do source code management much back in the days, and there are still some intermediate dev bits scattered across my backup drive that I cannot even date properly, but three branches I pushed (along with binaries, btw; feel free to fire up that qemu of yours and see how it crashes!) should contain major parts of what was done. ↫ Oleksandr Natalenko It may not carry the same import as Doom for the SNES, but it’s still great to see such continuity 15 years apart. I hope Natalenko manages to recover the remaining bits and bobs too, because you may never know – someone might be interested in picking up this 15 year old baton.

Nier: Automata Ver 1.1a Episode 2 English Dubbed

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Video by via Dailymotion Source Nier: Automata Ver 1.1a Episode 2:– 2B and 9S investigate the abandoned factory, where they encounter a group of machines.– They soon discover that the machines are being controlled by a mysterious server, known as “Adam”.– Adam reveals that he has been experimenting on machines, granting them self-awareness and emotions.– … Read more

Punjab’s majority satisfied with CM Maryam’s govt performance: survey

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Video by via Dailymotion Source #MaryamNawaz #Punjab #PMLNGovt #NawazSharif #ShehbazSharif Follow the ARY News channel on WhatsApp: https://bit.ly/46e5HzY Subscribe to our channel and press the bell icon for latest news updates: http://bit.ly/3e0SwKP ARY News is a leading Pakistani news channel that promises to bring you factual and timely international stories and stories about Pakistan, sports, … Read more