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Data elsewhere show fewer opportunities for people to fill software development and tech roles after the US labor market is no longer as hot as it was a few years ago.

“The tech job market has undeniably slowed since the end of 2022, cooling after a few years of rapid hiring during the pandemic recovery,” Daniel Zhao, Glassdoor’s lead economist, said in a written statement.

“Rising interest rates, the end of pandemic-era trends and a slowing economy overall has crimped demand for tech workers.”

“There was a slowdown in software developer hires in 2020, and then we had a couple bounce backs, and I think that’s reflective of how the pandemic really spurred this increase into digital service offerings,” Richardson said.

Nick Bunker, economic research director for North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab, told BI, “it’s unlikely we’ll see levels of demand like we saw in '21, in '22 for software development anytime soon.”

Data from Handshake, a platform where students can look for work, suggests a cooler demand for software developers or engineers.

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The US bank Wells Fargo has fired more than a dozen workers for alleged “simulation of keyboard activity”, in an apparent attempt to fool their employer into thinking they were working.

A company spokesperson said: “Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behaviour.”

Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JP Morgan, told the Economist last year that employees who did not want to commute to the office could find a job elsewhere.

In 2020, Microsoft apologised for using software that singled out individuals and assigned them a “productivity score” based on emails sent and meetings attended.

Last year the British thinktank the Institute for Public Policy Research called workplace surveillance “dystopian”, claiming that it disproportionately targeted minorities as well as female and younger workers.

Jennifer Abruzzo, the general counsel of the US National Labour Relations Board, said in a 2022 memo that she was worried about keystroke monitoring software being used by some employers in order to discourage workers from unionising.

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Oracle has started to dispatch Java audit letters to Fortune 200 companies for the first time, according to one licensing expert.

But industry experts have pointed out that businesses with limited Java use would have to license the software per employee under the latest model, a dramatic shift from the one previously offered by Oracle.

But that has changed in recent months, according to Craig Guarente, founder and CEO of Palisade Compliance, an independent Oracle licensing advisory company.

Guarente was speaking on a webinar hosted by Azul, which helps organizations move away from Oracle Java to open source alternatives.

In February 2023, Gartner warned that Oracle “actively targets organizations” on Java compliance following the introduction of new contractual terms for the code.

In July last year, The Register revealed Oracle was sending unsolicited emails to businesses offering to discuss Java subscription deals, seemingly in an effort to extract information that could be to its benefit in future license negotiations.

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Leaks of this white Xbox Series X suggested that Microsoft may have upgraded the heatsink used to cool the console, but we may have to wait on teardowns to confirm that.

The new Galaxy Black special edition Xbox Series X will come with a disc drive for $599.99 when it launches later this year.

The existence of a white Xbox Series X appears to confirm that Microsfot has canceled or pushed back the refreshed version of the Xbox Series X console that appeared in FTC v. Microsoft documents last year.

Codenamed Brooklin, the unannounced Xbox Series X refresh featured a more cylindrical design than the existing console, and it also would have had no disc drive.

Microsoft described that console as “adorably all digital” in internal documents, and it was supposed to ship with a new controller and Xbox Wireless 2 connection.

“It is hard to see our team’s work shared in this way because so much has changed and there’s so much to be excited about right now, and in the future,” said Spencer in a post on X in September.

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Even though the research commissioned by consultancy Engprax could be seen as a thinly veiled plug for Impact Engineering methodology, it feeds into the suspicion that the Agile Manifesto might not be all it’s cracked up to be.

One standout statistic was that projects with clear requirements documented before development started were 97 percent more likely to succeed.

“Our research has shown that what matters when it comes to delivering high-quality software on time and within budget is a robust requirements engineering process and having the psychological safety to discuss and solve problems when they emerge, whilst taking steps to prevent developer burnout.”

A neverending stream of patches indicates that quality might not be what it once was, and code turning up in an unfinished or ill-considered state have all been attributed to Agile practices.

One Agile developer criticized the daily stand-up element, describing it to The Register as “a feast of regurgitation.”

In highlighting the need to understand the requirements before development begins, the research charts a path between Agile purists and Waterfall advocates.

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Exclusive Red Hat is slowing or stopping development of some of its middleware software, a situation which could result in some staff layoffs.

The Register has seen what purports to be an internal email from the IBM subsidiary’s vice president of Middleware Engineering, Mark Little, revealing that development and maintenance of several of the company’s products will be slowed, stopped, or – using one of everyone’s favorite bits of corporate euphemism – “rightsized.”

Apparently the changes are part of the company’s “strategic realignment,” which is assessing the Hat’s products and services “to identify those that no longer aligned with our long-term strategy.”

The biggest batch of projects are those to be “rightsized,” which means the company will “reduce the number of associates working on the product to align to current business needs.”

Products on which fewer Hatters will be working include the following half dozen of Red Hat’s own builds of existing projects:

The Reg FOSS desk hopes that perhaps some of his former colleagues in Big Purple’s Java teams are able to find new roles associated with the now far more cool and trendy AI instead – either inside the company, or outside it.

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The rise of hybrid work has kept many bars’ and restaurants’ lunchtime business from recovering to pre-pandemic levels, according to data the digital payments platform Square released Tuesday.

Fast food chains are launching promotions to lure back diners turned off by price hikes, and alcohol brands are pushing canned cocktails as bar and restaurant menu tabs rise faster than grocery bills.

“That’s been the largest transformation in the last four or five years — the consumer habits of office workers,” said Ara Kharazian, research lead at Square, which provides electronic payment systems used by many bars, restaurants and stores.

Aceituna Grill, a fast-casual Mediterranean restaurant in Boston, has seen lunch crowds shrink at the three locations it has operated since before the pandemic, especially those near offices for Bank of America and PwC, according to CEO AJ Kurban.

The latter move was partly to comply with updated lease terms, and while Kurban said it’s too early to tell how it’ll pay off, he’s “expecting a positive impact.” At the Back Bay outpost, he added, “definitely weekends and nights are a lot busier there than any of our other locations.”

Only one major market bucked the trend Square identified: In heavily residential Brooklyn — less known for its lunch rush than office-packed Manhattan — midday spending was down by a modest 0.3%, but weekend transactions were still 0.5% shy of the borough’s pre-pandemic level, too.

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For some listeners on the call, it was a surprising goal: Microsoft had just shut down the Japanese developer Tango Gameworks, which was coming off the small, prestigious hit title Hi-Fi Rush.

When rumors swirled that it wasn’t doing well commercially, Aaron Greenberg, vice president of Xbox games marketing, wrote on X that Hi-Fi Rush “was a break out hit for us and our players in all key measurements and expectations.”

“While there are titles we can’t announce yet,” Spencer said in the September 2023 interview, translated by VGC, “we are currently developing new games in collaboration with Japanese companies.” It’s worth wondering if that’s still the plan now that Tango is shut down.

Even the original Hades is climbing back up the Steam charts, breaking its all-time peak player count record just today almost four years after its initial release.

While we don’t know exactly what sales goals Microsoft had for Hi-Fi Rush, clearly there is a demonstrated appetite for this kind of game, with Tango Gameworks positioned perfectly to deliver it.

With Hi-Fi Rush, Tango Gameworks gave Microsoft just what Booty says he wants: a small, creatively unique, highly praised, award-winning game.

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But a recent video from Displaced Gamers takes the idea from private theory to public execution, going into painstaking detail on how to get NES Tetris to start reading the game’s high score tables as machine code instructions.

But players can manipulate this jump thanks to a little-known vagary in how Tetris handles potential inputs when running on the Japanese version of the console, the Famicom.

As it happens, the area of RAM that Tetris uses to process this extra controller input is also used for the memory location of that jump routine we discussed earlier.

That means only a small portion of the NES’s available opcode instructions can be “coded” into the high score table using the available attack surface.

Of course, the lack of a battery-backed save system means hackers need to achieve these high scores manually (and enter these complicated names) every time they power up Tetris on a stock NES.

With that kind of full control, a top-level player could theoretically recode NES Tetris to patch out the crash bugs altogether.

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Ahead of Google’s annual I/O developer conference in May, the tech giant has laid off staff across key teams like Flutter, Dart, Python and others, according to reports from affected employees shared on social media.

“As we’ve said, we’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” said Google spokesperson Alex García-Kummert.

“To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023 and into 2024, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers, and align their resources to their biggest product priorities.

Through this, we’re simplifying our structures to give employees more opportunity to work on our most innovative and important advances and our biggest company priorities, while reducing bureaucracy and layers,” he added.

Meanwhile, others shared on Y Combinator’s Hacker News, where a Python team member detailed their specific duties on the technical front and noted that, for years, much of the work was done with fewer than 10 people.

WARN, or the California Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, requires employers with more than 100 employees to provide 60-day notice in advance of layoffs.

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Reps for Universal Television, which is producing the updated take from creators Greg Daniels and Michael Koman (Nathan for You), declined to comment as the details surrounding the project remain closely guarded.

Details on roles that Impacciatore and Gleeson are playing are being kept under wraps given the huge expectations that come along with anything connected to this new incarnation of The Office, though sources say Daniels and Koman have been casting a wide net to find talent availabilities for the latter half of this year.

As THR previously reported, The Office creator Greg Daniels opened up a development room in early January to explore a new series that will be set in the same universe as the former NBC hit (itself a take on the British Ricky Gervais comedy).

Impacciatore earned a supporting actress in a drama series Emmy nomination for her role in season two of HBO’s The White Lotus as Valentina, the manager of the Sicily hotel.

Her credits include Call My Agent and she next stars in Julian Schnabel’s feature In the Hand of Dante, opposite Oscar Isaac and Gal Gadot.

The new take on The Office comes at a busy time for Daniels, who recently scored a final season renewal for his Amazon comedy Upload.

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In the early 2000s, Olivia Packenham would get home from school, listen to the familiar sound of the dial up tone as her family computer connected to the internet, and navigate her AOL browser to the virtual gaming world of Neopets.

A crude social network that predated Facebook, the site allowed users to add friends, message one another, trade resources or virtual currency, and battle.

That was until the entrepreneur and investing consultant Dominic Law, who joined NetDragon in 2020 as director of new markets, launched an internal campaign to revive the Neopets brand, which he called “a major leap of faith”.

In addition to prioritizing drawing lapsed users back to the site, Neopets is flirting with licensing its intellectual property for a trading card game and a branded Monopoly board.

Law said rebalancing the Neopets economy was a top priority for the company, and acknowledged that many hackers and black market traders had emerged because the site was neglected for so long.

Such efforts to connect with Neopians have given many users hope that their experiences will be considered, particularly after the parent company experienced major backlash over a 2021 attempt to dive into NFTs and cryptocurrency.

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Another classic has been given the open source treatment, with Descent 3 from Outrage Entertainment now available under the MIT license.

This release was put up on GitHub by Kevin Bentley, one of the original developers.

It has a bit of an interesting history as it was originally ported to Linux way back in 2000 from Loki Entertainment, which didn’t age particularly well.

This includes the ‘1.5’ patch that Jeff Slutter and Kevin Bentley wrote several years ago.

Some proprietary sound and video libraries from Interplay have been stripped out (the ACM and MVE format).

A lot of this code was written by a really great team, but keep in mind we were much younger and less experienced back then.

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Playtron and Mysten Labs have announced the SuiPlay0X1, a new Steam Deck-alike that is being billed as “the world’s first blockchain native handheld games console.”

BREAKING: announcement from onstage at #SuiBasecamp: we’re excited to share the first handheld gaming device with native Web3 capabilities – the SuiPlay0X1, powered by @PLAYTR0N!

For the SuiPlay 0X1, that means tight integration with the Sui blockchain, which claims lower fees, faster transaction speeds, and easier scalability than some other crypto coins.

Playtron is “attempting to extract the PC gaming ecosystem from Windows and recontextualize in our own operating system,” CEO Kirt McMaster told VentureBeat.

Maybe Sui has fixed these problems, but so far, evidence suggests that cryptocurrency is still more useful as a speculative asset than an everyday payment option.

Without even vague gestures toward key details like specs, price, or planned release date (beyond “2025”), it’s hard to even evaluate how the 0X1 would work as a gaming device.

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There are already more billionaires than ever before (2,781), and the number is expected to soar in the coming years as an elderly generation of super-rich people prepare to give their fortunes to their children.

Research by Forbes magazine found there were 15 billionaires aged 30 or under but that none had created their own wealth, instead benefitting from huge inheritances.

Among them are Ireland’s Firoz Mistry, 27, and his brother Zahan, 25, who each have an estimated $4.9bn from their stakes in Tata Sons, the parent company of the Indian conglomerate Tate Group, which owns car brands including Jaguar Land Rover.

The world’s youngest billionaire is Livia Voigt, 19, who has a $1.1bn fortune thanks to a 3.1% stake in WEG Industries, a Brazilian electrical equipment producer co-founded by her grandfather Werner Ricardo.

“Looking to the longer term, the exceptional wealth resulting from the boom in entrepreneurial activity since the 1990s has established a foundation for future generations of billionaire families.”

The transfer is expected to make millennials the “richest generation in history”, says research by the real estate agent Knight Frank.

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The Linux Foundation last week announced that it will host Valkey, a fork of the Redis in-memory data store.

This fork originated at AWS, where longtime Redis maintainer Madelyn Olson initially started the project in her own GitHub account.

Olson told me that when the news broke, a lot of the current Redis maintainers quickly decided that it was time to move on.

“When the news broke, everyone was just like, ‘Well, we’re not going to go contribute to this new license,’ and so as soon as I talked to everyone, ‘Hey, I have this fork — we’re trying to keep the old group together,'” she said, “pretty much everyone was like, ‘yeah, I’m immediately on board.”

Redis’s announcement came right in the middle of the European version of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s KubeCon conference, which was held in Paris this year.

One area Redis (the company) is investing in is moving beyond in-memory to also using flash storage, with RAM as a large, high-performance cache.

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They were likely very close to seeing the backdoor update merged into Debian and Red Hat, the two biggest distributions of Linux, when an eagle-eyed software developer spotted something fishy.

Andres Freund, a developer and engineer working on Microsoft’s PostgreSQL offerings, was recently troubleshooting performance problems a Debian system was experiencing with SSH, the most widely used protocol for remotely logging in to devices over the Internet.

Through a combination of sheer luck and Freund’s careful eye, he eventually discovered the problems were the result of updates that had been made to xz Utils.

On Friday, Freund took to the Open Source Security List to disclose the updates were the result of someone intentionally planting a backdoor in the compression software.

Malicious code added to xz Utils versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 modified the way the software functions when performing operations related to lzma compression or decompression.

For instance, Tan replaced Collins’ contact information with their own on oss-fuzz, a project that scans open source software for vulnerabilities that can be exploited.

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Improved temporal stability at rest and in movement – less flickering and/or shimmering and “Fizziness” around objects in motion.

Improved temporal stability at rest and in movement – less flickering and/or shimmering and “Fizziness” around objects in motion.

Makes it easier for developers to debug and allows forward compatibility with updated versions of FSR.

Makes it easier for developers to debug and allows forward compatibility with updated versions of FSR.

They also once again reminded people that a 60FPS minimum is needed before Frame Generation will give the best experience in image quality and input latency.

Various other games have been announced to be getting AMD FSR 3 on top of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart including Cyberpunk 2077, Dragon’s Dogma 2, Dying Light 2 Stay Human, Frostpunk 2, Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut, NARAKA: BLADEPOINT, and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2.

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