Richard Speed reports via The Register: A study has found that software projects adopting Agile practices are 268 percent more likely to fail than those that do not. 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. The study's fieldwork was conducted between May 3 and May 7 with 600 software engineers (250 in the UK and 350 in the US) participating. One standout statistic was that projects with clear requirements documented before development started were 97 percent more likely to succeed. In comparison, one of the four pillars of the Agile Manifesto is "Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation." According to the study, putting a specification in place before development begins can result in a 50 percent increase in success, and making sure the requirements are accurate to the real-world problem can lead to a 57 percent increase. Dr Junade Ali, author of Impact Engineering, said: "With 65 percent of projects adopting Agile practices failing to be delivered on time, it's time to question Agile's cult following. "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." [...] Projects where engineers felt they had the freedom to discuss and address problems were 87 percent more likely to succeed. Worryingly, workers in the UK were 13 percent less likely to feel they could discuss problems than those in the US, according to the study.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Popular app Bartender was quietly bought, and a shady certificate replacement, insertion of invasive telemetry, and a lack of transparent responses by the new owners has shaken confidence in the Mac community. Menu bar organization tool Bartender has been around for a long time. For most of its life, it had an excellent reputation, and a responsive developer who communicated clearly with users. That appears to have changed, recently. It all started with a quiet pair of app certificate shifts which went mostly unnoticed. That is, until app monitoring service MacUpdater found out, and started asking questions. They posted a warning about the app, saying that "The company and developer behind Bartender was replaced in a silent and dubious matter." But, there's a lot more to the story than just that warning. CoreCode, the developer of MacUpdater, did a great deal of research on the new owners and the app situation prior to posting the warning. They detailed their discoveries in a Reddit thread on the matter. Research performed before the warning pointed out that blog entries on the Bartender website shifted to heavily search engine optimized content. This is in contrast to the prior informational entries previously posted by original developer Ben Surtees.

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Dan Robinson reports via The Register: VMware has made another small but notable post-merger concession to users: the Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro desktop hypervisor products will now be free for personal use. The cloud and virtualization biz, now a Broadcom subsidiary, has announced that its Pro apps will be available under two license models: a "Free Personal Use" or a "Paid Commercial Use" subscription for organizations. Workstation Pro is available for PC users running Windows or Linux, while Fusion Pro is available for Mac systems with either Intel CPUs or Apple's own processors. The two products allow users to create a virtual machine on their local computer for the purpose of running a different operating system or creating a sandbox in which to run certain software. [...] According to VMware, users will get to decide for themselves if their use case calls for a commercial subscription. There are no functional differences between the two versions, the company states, and the only visual difference is that the free version displays the text: "This product is licensed for personal use only." "This means that everyday users who want a virtual lab on their Mac, Windows, or Linux computer can do so for free simply by registering and downloading the bits from the new download portal located at support.broadcom.com," VMware says. Customers that require a paid commercial subscription must purchase through an authorized Broadcom Advantage partner. The move also means that VMware's Workstation Player and Fusion Player products are effectively redundant as the Pro products now serve the same role, and so those will no longer be offered for purchase. Organizations with commercial licenses for Fusion Player 13 or Workstation Player 17 can continue to use these, however, and they will continue to be supported for existing end of life (EOL) and end of general support (EoGS) dates.

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The Dillo browser dates back to 1999, writes the Register, with its own rendering engine. And now Dillo "has returned with a new release, version 3.1. "It's nearly nine years after version 3.05 appeared on the last day of June 2015." Version 3.1 incorporates dozens of fixes and improvements, as the official announcement describes. Project lead Rodrigo Arias Mallo announced his resurrection attempt on Hacker News early this year. He has taken the last available code from the project's Mercurial repository, incorporated about 25 outstanding fixes, and added as many again of his own. Dillo is a super-lightweight graphical web browser for Unix-like OSes, written using the Fast Light Toolkit. The latest version has a number of new features, although one of the most significant is support for Transport Layer Security. TLS is the successor to SSL, with a Microsoft-approved name. Dillo 3.1 supports it thanks to the Mbed-TLS library. It doesn't support frames, embedded media playback, or JavaSccript — but it can run on very low-end hardware... Thanks to Lproven (Slashdot reader #6,030) for sharing the news.

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Adobe updated Photoshop with the newest generative AI tools:

• Latest Adobe Firefly Image Model​: The new Adobe Firefly Image Model yields better people generation, photographic quality, colors, and dynamic range. It's also better at understanding and following your prompts and supports negative prompts, so you can bring your vision to life in Photoshop with more control and confidence in the results.​
• Text to Image (Generate Image in UI)​: Generate entire images or scenes from scratch using text prompts and additional creative controls with the new Text to Image (labeled “Generate Image” in Ps product UI) feature. You can generate complex, custom images and composites without leaving Photoshop, or combine multiple generated images on a canvas to ideate and refine ideas more efficiently​
• Generate Background​: Generate Background allows you to replace your background with generated content that matches the lighting, shadows, and perspective of the subject in just a few steps. Rather than manually selecting the background and using Generative Fill, with Generate Background, you can simplify workflows and save time with a streamlined experience in the Contextual Task Bar.

New version of Excire Foto 2024 was released and it is now on sale for $149 (instead of $189). Here are some of the updates:

• Apply OR and NOT operations for increased precision when searching with the Find by Keyword tool
• Select, copy, and paste subsets of keywords
• Use drag-and-drop functionality when assigning keywords to photos
• Take advantage of automatic copying of keywords to the clipboard when performing keyword copy-paste operations
• Access an all-new duplicate statistics dialog that allows for quick flagging of duplicate files
• Choose to exclude photo sequences from the Find Duplicates search
• Select the first photo of each duplicate-search-result cluster to save time when cleaning up folders
• New high-level filters to sort and locate images more effectively (including an option to identify files that have not yet been analyzed by the program)
• Extension of the text-search feature to metadata so users can locate images from the file path, file description, file headline, etc.
• The option to change the loading behavior for lens model metadata
• An “Invert selection” menu option
• Keyword tree multiselection
• A “Manage profiles” option in the “Renaming Profiles” dialog
• Minor bug fixes, design changes, and improvements

The post New updates released: Adobe Generative AI for Photoshop plus a new version of Excire Foto 2024 appeared first on Photo Rumors.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: In a Monday post, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan restated his belief that VMware's portfolio was too complex, and too poorly integrated, for the virtualization giant to represent true competition for hyperscale clouds. Broadcom's injection of R&D cash, he insisted, will see VMware's flagship Cloud Foundation suite evolve to become more powerful and easy to operate. He also admitted that customers aren't enjoying the ride. "As we roll out this strategy, we continue to learn from our customers on how best to prepare them for success by ensuring they always have the transition time and support they need," he wrote. "In particular, the subscription pricing model does involve a change in the timing of customers' expenditures and the balance of those expenditures between capital and operating spending." Customers also told Tan that "fast-moving change may require more time, so we have given support extensions to many customers who came up for renewal while these changes were rolling out." That's one of the changes -- Broadcom has previously not publicly suggested such extensions would be possible. "We have always been and remain ready to work with our customers on their specific concerns," Tan wrote. The other change is providing some ongoing security patches for VMware customers who persist with their perpetual licenses instead of shifting to Broadcom's subs. "We are announcing free access to zero-day security patches for supported versions of vSphere, and we'll add other VMware products over time," Tan wrote, describing the measure as aimed at ensuring that customers "whose maintenance and support contracts have expired and choose to not continue on one of our subscription offerings." The change means such customers "are able to use perpetual licenses in a safe and secure fashion."

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Topaz Labs released Photo AI v3.0.0 released - here is what's new:

• Presets: Save your commonly used filter combinations into a single stack, including the filter settings and selections. Presets will then appear in the enhancement menu so that you can reuse your favorite settings and selections across any of your photos with a single click. This will speed up the process of editing large batches of hundreds or thousands of photos at a time. You can also delete old presets by hovering over them in the enhancement menu.
• Docking & Collapsing: You can now dock the floating control panel on the right side of the viewport for easy access, or undock it and move it to where you need on top of your working preview area. The right panel is also now collapsible, making more space for viewing your image while editing. For maximum space, try undocking the control panel while in collapsible mode.
• Reordering: You can now re-order and combine your enhancements in any order on the right panel, allowing you to more dynamically chain effects together. For example, you can now sharpen the entire image first before denoising the background and then sharpening again with just the subject. Changing the order of the filters will affect the way the output is processed, and this freedom will allow you to achieve results that otherwise were not possible within Photo AI.
• RAW Balance Color & Adjust Lighting: On top of RAW Denoise, you are now able to adjust the color balance and lighting for RAW files inside Topaz Photo AI using our AI-based filters. This allows you to get the best quality possible out of your image straight from the camera and inside the application without having to make these adjustments in an external application even for RAW files.

Changelog:

• Refreshed user interface with Topaz UI style
• Implemented drag and reorder enhancements
• Implemented basic preset functionality
• Implemented docking and undocking feature
• Enabled Text Recovery to be added multiple times
• Enabled Face Recovery to be added multiple times
• Enabled Adjust lighting for RAW images
• Enabled Balance color for RAW images
• Fixed Adjust lighting crash on M3 with macOS 14.4 and above
• Fixed switching models on Denoise not updating the preview
• Fixed export output suffix not matching enhancements order
• Added preference for RAW Adjust lighting strength
• Added camera profile for Panasonic G9M2
• Added noise profile for Sony ILCE-6700

Luminar Neo Spring update 1.19.0 will be released on April 25, 2024 (see pricing) with new technologies like Water Enhancer AI, Twilight Enhancer AI, new masking tools for Luminosity and Object Selection, Batch processing in HDR Merge, and a brand new interface:

• Water EnhancerAI: Adjust and refine watercolors with a standalone feature that automates the process.
• Batch HDR: Speed up your workflow with batch processing for HDR Merge.
• Twilight EnhancerAI: Mimic the enchanting hues of the magic hour with precision and ease.
• Object Select & Luminosity Masking: Increase photo editing precision with advanced masking capabilities.
• Enhanced Waiting Statuses: See informative animations when loading and processing for real-time updates on actions in progress.
• Experience the new look and feel in the updated Luminar Neo: A fresh look and feel for both Luminar Neo and our website, with a brand-new logo, a distinctive color palette, and stylistic updates. Possibility to turn off Dynamic Background for the app (solid color for the background instead of blurred image for the full app) - On/Off switcher is located in Settings
• New Landscape category in Tools - now you can easily find all your favorite Landscape tools in the Landscape Category

The new ON1 Photo RAW 2024.3 is now officially released - see what's new:

• Complete Integration of ON1 NoNoise AI 2024
• Customizable User Interface
• Enhanced Export Performance
• Enhanced Raw File Support
• Support for New Cameras and Lenses

The post New: Topaz Photo AI v3.0.0, Luminar Neo 1.19.0, ON1 Photo RAW 2024.3 appeared first on Photo Rumors.