industryterm:software packages

CERN wechselt von Microsoft- zu Open-Source-Software | heise online
▻https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/CERN-wechselt-von-Microsoft-zu-Open-Source-Software-4447421.html

Das europäische Kernforschungszentrum CERN möchte Lizenzkosten für proprietäre Programme sparen. Dazu dient das „Microsoft Alternatives project“, kurz MAlt.

Migrating to open-source technologies | CERN
▻https://home.cern/news/news/computing/migrating-open-source-technologies

The Microsoft Alternatives project (MAlt) started a year ago to mitigate anticipated software license fee increases. MAlt’s objective is to put us back in control using open software. It is now time to present more widely this project and to explain how it will shape our computing environment.

Background

Over the years, CERN’s activities and services have increasingly relied on commercial software and solutions to deliver core functionalities, often leveraged by advantageous financial conditions based on the recognition of CERN’s status as an academic, non-profit or research institute. Once installed, well-spread and heavily used, the leverage used to attract CERN service managers to the commercial solutions tends to disappear and be replaced by licensing schemes and business models tuned for the private sector.

Given the collaborative nature of CERN and its wide community, a high number of licenses are required to deliver services to everyone, and when traditional business models on a per-user basis are applied, the costs per product can be huge and become unaffordable in the long term.

A prime example is that CERN has enjoyed special conditions for the use of Microsoft products for the last 20 years, by virtue of its status as an “academic institution”. However, recently, the company has decided to revoke CERN’s academic status, a measure that took effect at the end of the previous contract in March 2019, replaced by a new contract based on user numbers, increasing the license costs by more than a factor of ten. Although CERN has negotiated a ramp-up profile over ten years to give the necessary time to adapt, such costs are not sustainable.

Anticipating this situation, the IT department created the Microsoft Alternatives project, MAlt, a year ago.

MAlt’s objective

The initial objective was to investigate the migration from commercial software products (Microsoft and others) to open-source solutions, so as to minimise CERN’s exposure to the risks of unsustainable commercial conditions. By doing so, the laboratory is playing a pioneering role among public research institutions, most of whom have recently been faced with the same dilemma.

MAlt is a multi-year effort and it will now enter a new phase with the first migrations.

The project’s principles of engagement are to:

Deliver the same service to every category of CERN personnel
Avoid vendor lock-in to decrease risk and dependency
Keep hands on the data
Address the common use-cases

Coming in 2019

The first major change coming is a pilot mail Service for the IT department and volunteers this summer, followed by the start of CERN-wide migration. In parallel, some Skype for Business clients and analogue phones will migrate to a softphone telephony pilot.

Many other products and services are being worked on: evaluations of alternative solutions for various software packages used for IT core services, prototypes and pilots will emerge along the course of the next few years.

How will MAlt impact you and how to contribute?

You will find all the details and progress on the project site and more particularly the list of products addressed in the project.

The new computing newsletter blog will communicate on general items, and in addition, a general presentation will be provided in the Main Auditorium on 10 September at 2.30 p.m.

Needless to say, isolated initiatives will waste effort and resources. Instead, if you or your team are willing to participate, if you have ideas, the best way is to join the coordinated Microsoft Alternatives effort by checking the project site and contributing to the discussion channel.

Interesting times ahead! While the Microsoft Alternatives project is ambitious, it’s also a unique opportunity for CERN to demonstrate that building core services can be done without vendor and data lock-in, that the next generation of services can be tailored to the community’s needs and finally that CERN can inspire its partners by collaborating around a new range of products.

#FLOSS #Microsoft

Eucalyptus - Debian Wiki
▻https://wiki.debian.org/Eucalyptus

With #Debian we are already good in preparing software packages in a way that others can install - and optionally recompile - it easily. The #Amazon AWS Cloud services brought us Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), mostly sold as an increase in flexibility for public or other services with variable loads. To the Open Source enthusiasts it is more the immediate access to readily configured environments and the exchange of those in the community. And AWS has pioneered also the sharing of public data, which for today’s data-driven research may be more critical than compute time. The Eucalyptus euca2ools are a free way to communicate through the Amazon API. And the eucalyptus package allows for the installation of your #very_own #cloud installation.

Michel Bauwens : Contribution to the Great Transition Debate:

I very much appreciate Al Hammond insights into the new market dynamics of digital capitalism, and on the likely perenniality of the market function within a broader plurality of resource allocation methods.

One key for me is to distinguish capitalism from markets, and to realize that markets can be transformed. Markets can rule with a market state at their disposition , but market can also serve other more dominant systems of allocation as it did when it was an emergent force under feudalism.

Today, with the exponential growth of new digital and urban commons, most of which are subsumed under capital but by no means all of them, we have a new opportunity to transform markets so that they can serve the commons.

Capitalism is, as Kojin Karatani has argued in The Structure of World History, a three-in-one system: capital - state - nation.

Crucial in this current conjucture, is that the classic strategy of change ’within capitalism’, the famous Polanyan double movement, in which the mobilized people (aka the ’nation’) forced the state to periodically rebalance run-away capitalist logics, seems to no longer function. The most likely reason is that capital has become transnational, and that nation-states simply no longer have the clout and the will to rebalance through inter-state efforts.

This means that though the system is in deep crisis, it’s alternatives are in a bind too, which is a great opportunity for a more systematic transformation.

One of the potential strategies is to work with the commoners and their commons-based entrepreneurial coalitions, and to work, from the commons outward, to transform the market forms that depend on the commons. This is crucial , as capitalism in the advanced sectors and places, is moving from commodity-labor forms, to ’netarchical forms’, i.e. the direct exploitation of human cooperation, whether in commons-production or in distributed markets.

In my last contribution, I mentioned briefly protocol cooperativism. Here is the rationale for it.

In the last few years , we have seen the emergence of a cooperative/solidarity-based alternative to the netarchical platforms (GAFA), i.e. the platform cooperative movement. Signs of change are the two successfull conferences in NYC, evidence of union-coop funded platforms for nurses and cleaners, and more and more cooperative digital platforms that are listed in the Internet of Ownership directory. I am personally involved in the shift from the cooperative and ESS movement in France, towards a convergence of cooperative and commons forms; and the same evolution is underway in cooperative federations in other countries and Western Europe.

Platform coops are worker or multi-stakeholder owned and governed platforms, that are at the service of a commons or distributed market based community, in which the platform itself is considered a commons; and the ’cooperative’ legal form is considered to be a management model for such commons.

But they can easily slip back into competitive cooperativismand become mere collective modalities of capitalism. This is why platform coops need to be ’open coops’, i.e. they must make their contribution to the commons a strategic and legal priority. They must move from a position of capital accumulation, to a position of commons accumulation, and from a position of redistribution, to one of predistribution. The way to do this is by adopting protocol cooperativism.

This means there should not be 40 different ride-hailing coops competing with the one Uber, each with their own software (there are 13 ordering software packages for ordering food from CSA’s, only in the italian solidarity economy, as Jason Nardi of RIPESS told me once).

There should be one open source ride-hailing applications, which can be used by all the different open/platform cooperatives.

Given the fragmentation of the commons economy, who can be the ’agents’ of such transformation, of such ’commonification’ of market dynamics?

Today, we already have 2 such agents, but we need a third political/institutional one.

The two first agents which have emerged in the last 15 years are the global open source communities in the world of free software and open design, who have successfully created for-benefit associations (such as the FLOSS Foundations) as ’commons infrastructure organisations’.

The second agent are the global generative and entre-donneurial coalitions who have created market activities and incomes for the commons sector. This second sector is still very emergent and weak, but is exists and is growing.

But global transnational civic institiutions, and global post-capitalist ethical market coalitions may not be enough, we may need a transnational political institutions, i.e. the ’state form’ of the commons economy.

My intuition is that, in a age of increasingly fragmented sovereignty, coalitions of cities may play this role. The exponential rise of urban commons, (I identified 500 projects in a 300k populated city of Ghent, covering all provisioning systems), the rise of ’rebel cities’, ’fearless cities’, climate change coalized cities, commons-oriented progressive coalitions in spanish cities (look at the amazing Impetus Plan for the growth and support of the cooperative, solidarity and commons economy in Barcelona), give me hope that in time, coalitions of cities may emerge who can collective support the infrastructures of protocol cooperativism. In other words, networked cities today are a potential form of transnational governance that may also be an important agent for the commons transition.

The role of progressive coalitions at the nation-state level, is to support the emergence , consolidation, and trans-nationalization of the commons infrastructure, so that it becomes maximally resilient and able to withstand the pressures of global capital.

An all-out assault of a single progressive nation-state against capital today is doomed, but the nation-state arena can be an area for consolidation of a transnationally organized commons sector.

#Communs #Communs_urbains #Michel_Bauwens #Coopérativisme

Cluster failure: Why fMRI inferences for spatial extent have inflated false-positive rates
▻http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/06/27/1602413113.full

Functional MRI (fMRI) is 25 years old, yet surprisingly its most common statistical methods have not been validated using real data. Here, we used resting-state fMRI data from 499 healthy controls to conduct 3 million task group analyses. Using this null data with different experimental designs, we estimate the incidence of significant results. In theory, we should find 5% false positives (for a significance threshold of 5%), but instead we found that the most common software packages for fMRI analysis (SPM, FSL, AFNI) can result in false-positive rates of up to 70%. These results question the validity of some 40,000 fMRI studies and may have a large impact on the interpretation of neuroimaging results.

From Cloud to GIS : Getting Weather Data.

In this post we are going to look at how to get weather forecast data and display it as a layer in a desktop geographical information system (GIS).

http://www.digital-geography.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/finalqgisnice.png

▻http://www.digital-geography.com/cloud-gis-getting-weather-data

Découverte de ce #plugin pour #qgis dans les commentaires de l’article :

▻http://www.lutraconsulting.co.uk/products/crayfish

The Crayfish plugin aspires to be a time explorer for structured and unstructured mesh and vector datasets within QGIS. With Crayfish, users can load time varying mesh into QGIS. It currently supports several meteorology, hydrology and oceanography file formats.

ps : j’avais oublié le lien vers le premier article :p

Currently, Crayfish supports a number of file formats: NetCDF, GRIB, XMDF, Selafin files, SMS DAT and SWW. Examples of the software packages are: TUFLOW, AnuGA, BASEMENT, Flood Modeller 2D, HECRAS 2D, TELEMAC and Hydro_AS 2D.

Crayfish also allows user to view NetCDF and GRIB files directly in QGIS. In the example below, global temprature dataset (GRIB fromat) can be seen in QGIS.

http://www.lutraconsulting.co.uk/images/globaltemperature_grib_data.gif

#map #meteo

120 Years of Electronic Music | The history of electronic music from 1800 to 2015
►http://120years.net

http://120years.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/Fleming_valves.jpg

120 Years of Electronic Music* is a project that outlines and analyses the history and development of electronic musical instruments from around 1880 onwards. This project defines ‘Electronic Musical Instrument’ as an instruments that generate sounds from a purely electronic source rather than electro-mechanically or electro-acoustically (However the boundaries of this definition do become blurred with, say, Tone Wheel Generators and tape manipulation of the Musique Concrète era).

The focus of this project is in exploring the main themes of electronic instrument design and development previous to 1970 (and therefore isn’t intended as an exhaustive list of recent commercial synthesisers or software packages.) As well as creating a free, encyclopaedic, pedagogical resource on the History of Electronic Music (and an interesting list for Synthesiser Geeks) my main interest is to expose and explore musical, cultural and political narratives within the historical structure and to analyse the successes and failures of the electronic music ‘project’, for example;

The Cartographer Who’s Transforming Map Design | WIRED
▻http://www.wired.com/2014/10/cindy-brewer-map-design

http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/cindy-brewer.jpg

[Cindy Brewer’s] color schemes have been embedded in several software packages, including the statistical and graphics program R, and ArcGIS

http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/scale-master-660x398.jpg

#cartographie #couleurs #sémiologie