In the mobile world where Microsoft was forced to exit the business, operating systems are tightly controlled by Apple and Google.

By Siddharth Pai

Operating systems like Windows or MacOS are platforms which run on computers which allow the user to install other programs on the computer, such as Microsoft Word or Excel. Their equivalents in the mobile world are Apples iOS and Googles Android. These are closed operating systems, meaning that updates to the platform can only be provided by the original makers of the systems Microsoft in the case of Windows, Google in the case of Android and Apple in the case of MacOS and iOS.

In the mobile world where Microsoft was forced to exit the business, operating systems are tightly controlled by Apple and Google. Other companies, including the Chinese Huawei, have tried to create alternatives but the lead enjoyed by the market leaders is too great for upstarts to make meaningful inroads.

In the world of the computer and cloud networks however, things are different. In September 1991, Linus Torlvalds, created a family of open source operating systems kernels that were similar to Unix, a prevalent operating system at the time for multi-user computing. Being open source, Linux gained quick popularity with computer programmers who wanted to write programs independent of closed operating systems, and since 2004, Linux has been able to run on Windows based operating systems. It also runs seamlessly on Macs and other hardware.

Some years ago, Torvalds also created a programming language called Git, which was first envisioned to get around the difficulties of making Linux and Windows work together. I will save you the technical explanation of exactly how and why Torvalds created Git and will instead focus on the open source world. Both Linux and Git allow for a great deal of collaboration among programmers. Strangely, but also understandably, programmers feel a need to share their more elegant pieces of programming code with the world at large and a language like Git allows them to create these and share with ease.

Unsurprisingly, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have looked to monetise these repositories of computer code in Git. GitHub is the best known of these. Founded in 2008, it is a provider of internet hosting for software development environments using Git. By 2018, its revenue was north of US$ 200 million a year, and the platform had tens of millions of subscribing users. Unsurprisingly, it was bought by Microsoft in 2018 for a kings ransom$7.5 billion. Sometimes, the best way to deal with upstart potential competitors is to buy them out.

Meanwhile, a minnow in the field, GitLabwhich was direct competitor to GitHubstayed independent. It debuted last Thursday on the NASDAQ and its current value is in the region of US$ 16.5 billion. It appears that the Covid boom era of tech IPOs has been kind to yet another minnow debutante. GitLabs current value is over twice what the much better funded GitHub was able to collect from Microsoft in 2018. Very interestingly for a pre-Covid enterprise, GitLab was founded as a fully remote company with no headquarters. It had no real estate. All employees across the globe supposedly had equal access to information. GitLab has an online handbook, now consisting of over 2,000 web pages. The handbook defines in detail how the company operates, covering engineering, finance, marketing, hiring, compensation, benefits, stock options, and of course, remote work.

Some time ago, I had written that IT services firms, as we have come to know and accept them, will inexorably become outmoded models. Publicly available platforms are being increasingly used for the requisitioning and delivery of services. The cost of software development is ever decreasing with re-usable code libraries such as those available on GitHub and GitLab. A large amount of software development today is done with the use of free open-source libraries.

Also, the contracting cost around buying and selling software and business services is plummeting. Indian offshore services are now de rigueur at most organisations in the US and other markets. This calls into question whether services firms need to act as a nexus of contracts as they have done so far or whether the future will be one where services firms increasingly become simply a platform for buyers and sellers to collaborate. The platform will itself only provide a few signature processes such as quality control and the programmers availability that all participants in the services market (buyers and sellers) will agree to.

Until now, we have seen the rise of a marketplace-oriented business culture only among less skilled service workers such as cab drivers and couriers. Still, they provide an interesting sociological test bed for the future, as these marketplace forms of organization begin to replace the current dynamic of employer-to-employee relationships. It is now evident to me that we are much closer to that future. While Indias IT services companies have grown smartly during Covid, the supply-side problems of finding quality IT talent have increased several-fold. There is an intense war for talent with five to ten years of experience. Pay packets are skyrocketing. Many IT employees, who have now grown used to working remotely, are unwilling to submit themselves to horrendous commutes and regimented workplaces and are either refusing to come back int into their offices or voting with their feet.

The industry is ripe for disruption by a player who can provide a platform for most IT services. Git repositories will help.

The author is Technology consultant and venture capitalistBy invitation

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Rewriting the code: The commercialisation of computer code collaboration - The Financial Express

Programming and coding are an art! Expert sometimes points that programmers are born with the skill. Even though coders are naturally gifted with code flow, application development is a challenging field that needs various sources of acceleration. The way of coding and application development has evolved over the years. There are many popular languages, frameworks, tools, and libraries available for programmers to refer to. Besides, there is also an increase in the birth of developer communities that help programmers make their job easy. These developer communities are open-sourced and free to access. They also provide question corners where users can post their doubts, and experts will take the chance to answer them. For the past two decades, this has become a main source of information for many application developers. Here is the list of the top 10 Python communities everyone should join in 2021.

PySlackers is a growing and inclusive community of Python enthusiasts ranging from those just starting to those who have built their entire careers around it. This community has a range of resources from the main presence on Slack to community projects. Here, you will find a collection of community-specific resources such as rules, codes of conduct, locations of team services, etc.

The Real Python Members Slack is an English-speaking Python community with members located all over the world. Everyone is welcome, no matter how much experience you have. If youre friendly and like Python then Real Python would love to have you on board.

Full Stack Python is a non-profit with the mission to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers. Anyone that uses Python, and has an active interest in the Python community can join the PSF as a member.

Led by enthusiasts and advocates, the NHS Python Community for Healthcare is an open community of practice that champions the use of the python programming language and open code in the NHS and healthcare sector.

PythonistaCafe is an invite-only, online community of Python and software development enthusiasts helping each other succeed and grow. Inside PythonistaCafe, you will interact with professional developers and hobbyists from all over the world who share their experiences in a private settingso you can learn from them and avoid the same mistakes they have made.

Python community is vast, diverse, and aims to grow each other. The developer communitys user base is enthusiastic and dedicated to spreading the use of language far and wide. Python community can help support the beginner, the expert, and adds to the ever-increasing open-source knowledge base. The community is also working on improving transparency, providing the community with opportunities to interact with them, and being responsive to raised suggestions.

The HackerEarth platform uses artificial intelligence to give users access to more than 2,500 questions used by Fortune 50 companies in several coding challenges and programming interviews. The community provides a real-time coding interview environment to test users coding skills in Java, Python, and C++. They also avail an excellent opportunity for programmers to become familiar with coding interview questions and formats.

If you are looking for some of the most talented developers who are well-adept, TopTal is the side you should head for. Whether you are looking for a professional tune-up or hire a freelancer, TopTal is one of the best communities for developers.

Python Discord is a large community focused on the Python programming language. Python Discord believes that anyone can learn to code and is very dedicated to helping novice developers take their first steps into the world of programming. It also attracts a lot of expert developers who are seeking friendships, collaborators, and who wish to hone their craft by teaching and getting involved in the community.

Join OpenEDG Python Institute Community on social media and interact with Python enthusiasts from all over the world! Introduce yourself to the community, get involved in discussions, take free courses, receive your exam discount voucher, and get certified.

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Top 10 Python Communities Everyone Should Join in 2021 - Analytics Insight

AMC is adding onscreen captioning to 240 locations across the U.S. to make moviegoing more accessible. Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP hide caption

AMC is adding onscreen captioning to 240 locations across the U.S. to make moviegoing more accessible.

The world's largest movie theater chain is adding onscreen captions at hundreds of U.S. locations in an effort to make moviegoing more accessible.

AMC Theatres announced last Friday that 240 of its locations in more than 100 U.S. markets are adding open captioning to certain showings. The change took effect last week and is aimed at improving the viewing experience for people who have hearing loss and for whom English is not their first language.

"Inclusive programming is core to AMC's strategy, and we're proud to lead the theatrical exhibition industry by making some open caption showtimes available at hundreds of our locations nationwide," Elizabeth Frank, AMC's chief content officer and executive vice president of worldwide programming, said in a statement.

Open captions similar to subtitles appear on the screen and cannot be turned off, while closed captioning is displayed on electronic devices that customers must request. The company says the "vast majority" of showtimes will continue to be offered with closed captioning, meaning it will still make assisted listening devices available at all of its locations.

Every AMC market with at least two theaters will also make some open caption showtimes available weekly for all new releases, the company explained. Open captions will also be offered through AMC's private theater rentals program at certain locations.

Moviegoers at participating locations can search for open-caption showtimes on AMC Theatres' website and mobile app. They are currently available for a mix of weekend, weekday, evening and matinee showings, and the company expects them to evolve based on feedback and demand.

"Initial consumer response has been very positive, and we anticipate strong demand with growing awareness of open caption showtimes at AMC," Frank added.

CEO Adam Aron noted on Twitter that the open captions are coming just in time for the big-screen arrival of Disney's Eternals. The film is set to open in theaters on Nov. 5 and features deaf actress Lauren Ridloff as the Marvel Cinematic Universe's first deaf superhero.

Ridloff spoke about the moviegoing experience in an interview with The New York Times last month, describing deaf people as "an afterthought in movie theaters" and calling for change.

"You have to use a special closed-captioning device to watch subtitling in a theater, and it's a headache, because most of the time the devices don't work," she explained. "Then you have to go back to the front desk and find somebody to help, and by the time they figure it out that it's not working that it's not going to be subtitled at all the movie's halfway done."

Disability rights advocates have long sought to make theaters more accessible, from better audio dubbing to smartphone closed-captioning technology.

Many are praising AMC for its recent announcement.

Christian Vogler, a professor and director of the Technology Access Program at Gallaudet University in D.C., told The Washington Post that deaf and hard of hearing advocates "have been asking for expanded access to open captions since forever."

He also said that expanding accessibility could improve the experience of all moviegoers, noting that captions are useful in many scenarios and are being used in more and more places as the technology expands.

American Paralympian Chuck Aoki praised AMC's move as "absolutely phenomenal" in a tweet.

"Captions aren't harmful to the experience, but help millions enjoy the movie more," he wrote. "Well done!"

This story originally appeared on the Morning Edition live blog.

Link:
AMC Theatres adds open captioning to movies at locations across the US - NPR

After almost two years since it closed for renovations, the Ballard Pool is finally open to the public once again.

Seattle Parks and Recreation closed the pool in December 2019 and worked throughout the past year to perform major renovations to the pool, including replacing the concrete pool deck, drains, pool and spay plaster liners, and filtration system. Some delays in the renovation and the pandemic caused the closure to be much longer than anticipated.

The Ballard Pool opened on Oct. 18, offering lap swimming, fitness, and some coached swims (see full schedule below). As a reminder, proof of vaccination will be required to enter the Ballard Pool starting Monday, Oct. 25.

Seattle Parks and Recreationhas been ramping up its public services and programming at various recreation facilities in the city since Sept. 7. Most public pools are reopening for aquaticfitness and limited aquatic exercise classes, while community centers and environmental learning centers have begun to offer recreation and programming.

Meadowbrook Pool also opened this week, following several September openings of various pools around the city including Medgar Evans, Rainier Beach, Southwest, Madison, and Queen Anne (open for rentals only until Jan. 2022). Evans Pool is still closed, but it is set to reopen in January.

Photos: SPR

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Ballard Pool now open after two years of renovation and pandemic closures - My Ballard

A lot is occurring in technology disruption, from smart and connected gadgets to AI-powered apps, and more is predicted in the coming years. As a result, many new employment opportunities are being created, and many current job profiles are being re-defined. This is where computer programming, or coding, becomes a critical talent for people looking for the most significant job opportunities or improving their current skills and abilities.

Coding is a game-changer, and currently, it is recognised as a necessary skill and a competitive advantage for a wide range of professional roles. Undoubtedly one of the most important talents to master for current and future generations, coding and programming help young students develop problem-solving abilities, such as solving an issue rationally and creatively.

The UAE has launched initiatives under the Project of the 50 aiming to attract 100 of the worlds best coders to the country every day.

In 2017, Sheikh Mohammed launched the One Million Arab Coders to teach one million young people from the Arab world how to code. As part of the initiative, the selected candidates were taught various coding skills and applied them in website and mobile application development, blockchain, artificial intelligence, data, and cloud computing.

Since its launch, the initiative has awarded over 1,000 nano degree certificates to distinguished coders. In addition, more than 3,600 certified trainers from around the world helped the participants with the technical aspects and provided support in converting their ideas into practical projects. The initiative, led by the Dubai Future Foundation (DFF) and within the Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Initiatives (MBRGI) framework, achieved its goal in three years.

Sheikh Mohammed also recently launched the National Programme for Coders in partnership with global tech giants, including Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, LinkedIn, and Facebook. The scheme seeks to train 100,000 coders, establish 1,000 digital companies that will go global, and increase start-up investments from Dhs1.5bn to Dhs4bn.

The private sectors are also not far behind. Recently, Majid Al Futtaim announced a coding programme designed specifically for women, the private sectors first of its kind for the region.

In line with these visions, GITEX Global, the largest IT exhibition of the year, has introduced CodeInfinity the regions first and only developer event to empower young programmers. Microsoft, Oracle and Red Hat have joined as the founding partners. Interested candidates can register for the Microsoft, and Red Hat certified training courses and Oracles hands-on labs.

Oracles cloud platform, OCI, with race data, is a no-stress, beginner-friendly environment. Candidates can use an open-source machine learning stack and different Oracle Cloud platforms to prototype predictive algorithms. These models are developed with data from past races and can be used in production or reused in video game technology.

A major global tech event set to be held from October 17-21 at the Dubai World Trade Centre, GITEX Global will see technology and business leaders from across the globe gather to develop growth strategies for the future.Read: GITEX Future Stars: Meet the innovative startups from UAE, Italy and South Korea

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Here's why coding is a biggest game changer for digital innovation - Gulf Business

October 20, 2021Alex Woodie

Artificial intelligence is often thought of as a futuristic technology that may have repercussions for IBM i, but only in the future. Maybe AI will be important to IBM i about the same time when we have flying cars and moving sidewalks. But as a recent POWERUp presentation by an IBM cloud and AI architect shows, AI is already happening on the IBM i server, and its happening today.

Benoit Marolleau, who is the cloud and AI architect for the IBM Client Center Montpellier (France), made a compelling case for IBM i shops to start exploring how they can potentially employ AI technology to enhance their applications in his POWERUp presentation, titled Smarter IBM i Applications Made Easy with AI.

First, Marolleau sought to dispel the notion that AI is some fancy futuristic technology. In fact, it is all around us, he says. It is everywhere, he says. When you use any application, there are recommendation engines that customize your experience. . . . The goal here is really to enhance the user experience.

Anybody who has searched for a show on Netflix or used Waze to avoid getting a speeding ticket has been a beneficiary of AI. Of course, Netflix and Google (which owns Waze) are giant technology firms that can afford the best data scientists that money can buy. Surely AI is beyond the realm of your average small-to-midsize IBM i customer, right?

Relax! Everything you need for AI is on IBM i, IBM cloud and AI architect Benoit Marolleau says.

Not so fast. While there is a fair bit of magic going on in AI for instance, nobody can fully explain exactly how the biggest neural network models actually work the barrier of entry for AI is surprisingly low. Thats due in part to all the work that has gone into AI tech before us, and the miracle of open source. We truly are lucky to be standing on the shoulders of AI giants.

On IBM i, weve got all the technology that is needed to run AI, Marolleau says. We have the data, in Db2 for i. We have core business applicationsWeve got more and more open source technologies on the IBM i, on Power Systems, technologies to build these AI models, these predictive models. And lately we announced Power10 servers, which sports something called Matrix Math Acceleration (MMA) that can goose ML training workloads by 5x or more.

There are many ways to apply AI in the IBM i realm, which has always valued practicality of applying information technology rather than applying IT for its own sake. Its a way to do more with less, Marolleau says.

Examples of AI applications that could be relevant to IBM i shops include fraud detection, churn prediction, and predictive maintenance. In these cases, machine learning models can be trained on highly structured tabular data housed in ERP and CRM databases. These are classic machine learning applications, but there are other examples of AI that use less structured data.

Using columns of training data, machine learning generates its prediction in a new column.

For instance, there is natural language processing (NLP), which is a form of AI that uses deep learning techniques to glean the ability to understand human-written sentences and even compose some words of its own. One way to apply NLP is to create a knowledgebase thats based on all the knowledge a company has stored in its databases and file systems, and then expose that knowledge base to the ERP or business application, Marolleau says.

Another way to harness NLP is through the humble chatbot, which is a basically a program that exposes that knowledgebase to the outside world. With the chatbot, the AI magic is happening both through the ability to understand the essence of a customers query, and then serving the response back to the user, which is pretty much your classic search engine use case. We have many customers with chatbots, Marolleau says.

Computer vision is the other main form of AI thats using deep learning. In essence, computer vision is AI applied to images taken from a camera for the purpose of object detection and identification. Facial recognition is another form of computer vision that is popular today.

Marolleau encourages IBM i pros to check out his computer vision application for IBM i at github.com/bmarolleau/paiv-ibmi.

During his presentation, Marolleau performed a short demo of what it takes to develop an AI application. He clearly is familiar with the tools and made it look somewhat easy. But the key message that he got across was that the tools are readily available to the average IBM i professional and they are not that difficult to work with. Above all, machine learning is not rocket science. (Its actually just data science.)

Just to remind you, machine learning is not new, Marolleau says. It was born in the 50s. It learns from data, as I said. Youve got to have many examples, examples of your rows in your database, and many columns, because you are observing complex phenomenon. Your business is complex in general.

The good news is that much of the software required to develop machine learning on IBM i is free and its open source. And while knowledge of your data and some expertise is required, you dont have to be a full-blown Netflix-level data scientist to apply machine learning to your business.

Dont worry most of the time, you dont implement the machine learning algorithms. You use libraries in Python, Marolleau says. Its just an algorithm that will use your experience at training time, and based on that, once trained, the model is operational and ready to be integrated in your existing applications.

IBM i already supports many of the Python libraries that contain many of the most common machine learning algorithms that can be deployed out-of-the box. Scikit-learn is probably the most well-known Python data science library. Others include NumPy and SciPy. These tools have been available on the platform since 2018.

IBM i supports all the software needed to develop, train, and deploy machine learning applications.

Marolleau recommends that developers use Juypter notebooks to play around with their IBM i data and use them to build machine learning models. You can use the Python Package Manager to install Juypter, he says. This is a way to graphically code, to have an integrated IDE for Python on IBM i.

Another path to developing machine learning models is to use an autoML tool, Marolleau says. AutoML tools handle a lot of the details, such as parameter tuning and feature selection, for the user. There are several AutoML offerings that work with Power Systems, including the Driverless AI package from H2O.ai (H2O also develops one of the most popular open source machine learning libraries). IBM also offers Watson Studio with AutoAI. The analytics powerhouse SAS also develops Power Systems-compatible AutoML capabilities with its Viya offering.

Users can train their new models on IBM i, but many will choose some other platform to do it (such as Linux). The new Power10 chips have on-board MMA accelerators to reduce the training time; GPUs are also sought-after resources for training machine learning models, in particular deep learning models that require very large data sets.

Once the training is done, the finished model can be transferred to the IBM i, where it can be used for inference. Inference is model execution, prediction in production, Marolleau says. There are many ways to do that. You could normally run PASE. If you have an ILE application, you can use to synchronously interact with the models REST API, or it could be through the database. It could be just a program code invocation form an existing programs. It could also be more complex scenarios with asynchronous technologies like data queues, like Kafka, like ActiveMQ, MQTT, available on IBM i as well.

AI is expected to generate trillions of dollars in value in the years to come. While IBM i pros are accustomed to deterministic programming, they will need to make the shift to probabilistic programming if they want to take advantage of the opportunities that AI provides. The good news is that the folks at IBM and the wider IBM i community are doing the work to bring AI tools to the platform. Its a good start, and now its up to the IBM i user base to begin familiarizing themselves with the emerging AI paradigm and to start integrating it with the line of business applications that have served the community so well.

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Yes, AI Is Happening on IBM i, and It's Happening Now - IT Jungle