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Microsoft

Microsoft Makes Xamarin Free In Visual Studio, Will Open Source Core Xamarin Tech (venturebeat.com) 143

Posted by msmash from the 'developers-developers-developers' dept.
An anonymous reader cites a report on VentureBeat: Microsoft today announced that Xamarin is now available for free for every Visual Studio user. This includes all editions of Visual Studio, including the free Visual Studio Community Edition, Visual Studio Professional, and Visual Studio Enterprise. Furthermore, Xamarin Studio for OS X is being made available for free as a community edition and Visual Studio Enterprise subscribers will get access to Xamarin's enterprise capabilities at no additional cost. The company also promised to open source Xamarin's SDK, including its runtime, libraries, and command line tools, as part of the .NET Foundation 'in the coming months.' Plenty of developers will find this announcement exciting. Xamarin being free is a big deal.
Hardware

Graphene Flakes Facilitate Neuromorphic Chips (ieee.org) 22

Posted by Soulskill from the impenetrable-research-for-the-day dept.
An anonymous reader writes: One of the hot areas of semiconductor research right now is the creation of so-called neuromorphic chips — processors whose transistors are networked in such a way to imitate how neurons interact. "One way of building such transistors is to construct them of lasers that rely on an encoding approach called "spiking." Depending on the input, the laser will either provide a brief spike in its output of photons or not respond at all. Instead of using the on or off state of the transistor to represent the 1s and 0s of digital data, these neural transistors rely on the time intervals between spikes." Now, research published in Nature Scientific Reports has shown how to stabilize these laser spikes, so that they're responsive at picosecond intervals. "The team achieved this by placing a tiny piece of graphene inside a semiconductor laser. The graphene acts as a 'saturable absorber,' soaking up photons and then emitting them in a quick burst. Graphene, it turns out, makes a good saturable absorber because it can take up and release a lot of photons extremely fast, and it works at any wavelength; so lasers emitting different colors could be used simultaneously, without interfering with each other—speeding processing."
Businesses

Video Brady Forrest Talks About Building a Hardware Startup (Video) 8

Posted by Roblimo from the another-way-to-make-hardware-is-to-leave-milk-out-for-elves dept.
Brady Forrest is co-author of The Hardware Startup: Building Your Product, Business, and Brand. He has extensive experience building both products and startups, including staffing, financing, and marketing. If you are thinking or dreaming about doing a startup, you should not only watch the video to "meet" Brady, but read the transcript for more info than the video covers.
Government

Cities Wasting Millions of Taxpayer's Money In Failed IoT Pilots 149

Posted by samzenpus from the throwing-good-money-after-bad dept.
dkatana writes: Two years ago at the Smart Cities Expo World Congress, Antoni Vives, then Barcelona's second deputy mayor, said he refused to have more technology pilots in the city: "I hate pilots, if anyone of you [technology companies] comes to me selling a pilot, just get away, I don't want to see you." He added, "I am fed up with the streets full of devices. It is a waste of time, a waste of money, and doesn't deliver anything; it is just for the sake of selling something to the press and it does not work."

Barcelona is already a leading city in the use of IoT and, according to Fortune, "The most wired city in the world". Over the past 10 years, the city has experienced a surge in the number of sensors, data collection devices and automation and has become "a showcase for the smart metropolis of the future". Over the past few years technology companies have sold pilot programs costing millions of dollars to cities all over the world, claiming it will enhance their "Smart City" rating. Unfortunately, after the initial buzz, many of those pilots never get beyond the evaluation stage and are abandoned because the cities cannot afford them in the first place.

Submission + - Slashdot for Sale (again) 4

Submitted by Defenestrar
Defenestrar writes: DHI Group (formerly known as Dice Holdings) will auction off Slashdot and Sourceforge. The stated reason for the sale is that DHI has not successfully leveraged the Slashdot user base.

The future is uncertain, but at least it doesn't have Beta

Submission + - Dice Ditches Slashdot and SourceForge (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by lq_x_pl
lq_x_pl writes: After failing to effectively capitalize on Slashdot's user base, Dice Holdings is deciding to sell off Slashdot and Sourceforge. Dice also announced that they would be selling off Sourceforge. The change of ownership is likely welcome, as Dice has been much-maligned by Slashdot's regulars.

Submission + - DHI Group is selling off Sourceforge and Slashdot (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In their own words DHI Group, formerly known as DICE Holdings, has "not successfully leveraged the Slashdot user base to further Dice's digital recruitment business." As a result, DHI plans to sell off both Slashdot and Sourceforge, the latter of which has become notorious for inserting malware into the installers of popular open-source projects such as GIMP. All of this is likely to make the Slashdot editor's censoring of the Sourceforge scandal on DICE's behalf pointless to say the least, but the question remains; what is the future of Slashdot, without DHI Group?
Education

Nobel Laureate and Laser Inventor Charles Townes Passes 73

Posted by samzenpus from the rest-in-peace dept.
An anonymous reader writes Charles Hard Townes, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, who shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for invention of the laser and subsequently pioneered the use of lasers in astronomy, died early Tuesday in Oakland. He was 99. "Charlie was a cornerstone of the Space Sciences Laboratory for almost 50 years,” said Stuart Bale, director of the lab and a UC Berkeley professor of physics. “He trained a great number of excellent students in experimental astrophysics and pioneered a program to develop interferometry at short wavelengths. He was a truly inspiring man and a nice guy. We’ll miss him.”

Comment Re:subject to eavesdropping and interception (Score 1) 245

by MrNemesis (#48367361) Attached to: ISPs Removing Their Customers' Email Encryption

So let's say you do go to the bother of setting up a nice GPG system between yourself and third parties and you're happily transmitting your alphanumeric gobbledeygook to your mail server via STARTTLS... ...along comes Verizon or whomever. They strip out the TLS negotiation and now your mail client is authenticating to your mail server in plaintext. Any MITM attacker will then sniff your credentials and start playing funny games with your mail. Blackholing your GPG encrypted mails? Randomising each sig block it sees every time? Replacing signature.asc on all of the mails with their own? Sending fake messages saying "I can't get this stupid encryption thing to work, can we just talk normally please?!"? Worse still is that Alice and Bob will now have a false sense of security whilst Charlie laughs all the way to the Nigerian Bank/NSA/HMRC/GEFAFWISP. GPG in the context where a MITM is blatantly trying to undermine the authentication process is a bit like putting a secure padlock on a paper bag.

In short: just encrypting your mail at the source isn't really a solution to what is a blatant MITM attack. Hopefully server and client software will start mandating TLS instead of STARTTLS very soon... wish it had been the default for years.

Comment Re:Less static hardware. (Score 1) 993

I don't know if I'm alone here but I've been hot-plugging CPUs, RAM and even, shock horror, keyboards and mice on linux now for at least five years without having to use systemd to do it. Linux has had awesome hotplug support for years, even in the bad ol' days of static devfs.

Not trying to denigrate the GP - I suspect they've just never had to deal with a server environment that changed much. But rest assured linux has been capable of dealing with radical changes in hardware for at least five years, and changes to peripherals (disc, network, keyboards, USB, blah) for at least a decade. That people think this sort of thing is only possible with systemd is all just mirrors and wires.

Comment TV Go Home (Score 1) 137

by MrNemesis (#48037087) Attached to: Tetris To Be Made Into a Live Action Film

This was already shown back on Charlie Brooker's TV Go Home over a decade ago. No link sadly as it's flagged as "obscene" by the company filter...

TETRIS

A Dark Thriller starring Nick Berry.

Professor Jack Warburton discovers the source of the tumbling fun to be a shadowy government bureau, and uncovers the alarming scientific method by which complete rows of blocks mysteriously "disappear".

Starring:
Jack Warburton - Nick Berry
Hannah Turnpike - Caroline Catz
Spatial Awareness Dude - Dexter Fletcher
L-shaped Block - Charles Dance
Cerys Matthews - Ray Winstone
Google

Google To Require As Many As 20 of Its Apps Preinstalled On Android Devices 427

Posted by samzenpus from the new-rules dept.
schwit1 writes Google is looking to exert more pressure on device OEMs that wish to continue using the Android mobile operating system. Among the new requirements for many partners: increasing the number of Google apps that must be pre-installed on the device to as many as 20, placing more Google apps on the home screen or in a prominent icon folder and making Google Search more prominent. Earlier this year, Google laid its vision to reduce fragmentation by forcing OEMs to ship new devices with more recent version of Android. Those OEMs that choose not to comply lose access to Google Mobile Services (GMS) apps like Gmail, Google Play, and YouTube.

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