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Submission + - Microsoft removes Windows Subsystem for Linux 'beta' tag in Fall Creators Update (betanews.com)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Today, Microsoft takes its commitment to Linux a bit further. You see, it has announced that "Windows Subsystem for Linux" will be shedding its "beta" designation in Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. In fact, the Beta tag has already been removed in Windows 10 Insider Build 16251. In other words, the beta label on the feature has been taken off in a beta version of the operating system. Confused? Welcome to the party, pal!

"We're excited to announce that in Windows 10 Fall Creators Update (FCU) due to ship in fall 2017, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) will no longer be a beta feature and will become a fully supported Windows feature. Early adopters on the Windows Insider program will notice that WSL is no longer marked as a beta feature as of Insider build 16251. This will be great news for those who've held-back from employing WSL as a mainline toolset: You'll now be able to leverage WSL as a day-to-day developer toolset, and become ever more productive when building, testing, deploying, and managing your apps and systems on Windows 10," says Richard Turner, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft.

Submission + - Tesla and Noeon to build world's biggest lithium ion battery in South Australia

Submitted by WillKemp
WillKemp writes: US car maker, Tesla, and French renewables company, Neoen, in partnership with the government of South Australia, will build a 139 MWh battery. This will allow Noeon's Hornsdale Power Reserve wind farm to meet round the clock demand for electricity in a state which has been troubled by power outages in recent times. Romain Desrousseaux, deputy chief executive Neoen, said it will be the biggest Lithium ion battery in the world. When he proposed the project in March,Tesla boss, Elon Musk, promised to deliver the battery within 100 days or supply it free of charge — a promise which prompted Atlassian co-founder, Cannon-Brookes, to respond with "Holy s#%t". State Premier, Jay Weatherill, said the Government had more than 90 international bids for the battery project.

Submission + - Survey says: Raspberry Pi still rules, but x86 SBCs have made gains (linuxgizmos.com)

Submitted by __aajbyc7391
__aajbyc7391 writes: Results from LinuxGizmos.com's annual hacker-friendly single board computer survey are in, and not surprisingly, the Raspberry Pi 3 is the most desired maker SBC by a 4-to-1 margin. In other trends: x86 SBCs and Linux/Arduino hybrids have trended upwards. The site's popular hacker SBC survey polled 1,705 survey respondents and asked for their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd favorite SBCs from a curated list of 98 community oriented, Linux- and Android-capable boards. Spreadsheets comparing all 98 SBCs' specs and listing their survey vote tallies are available in freely downloadable Google Docs.

Submission + - Google: 99.95% of Recent 'Trusted' DMCA Notices Were Bogus (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: In comments submitted to a U.S. Copyright Office consultation, Google has given the DMCA a vote of support, despite widespread abuse. Noting that the law allows for innovation and agreements with content creators, Google says that 99.95% of URLs it was asked to take down last month didn't even exist in its search indexes. “For example, in January 2017, the most prolific submitter submitted notices that Google honored for 16,457,433 URLs. But on further inspection, 16,450,129 (99.97%) of those URLs were not in our search index in the first place.”

Submission + - Early explorer logbooks reveal sea ice have not changed in 100 yrs (sciencealert.com) 3

Submitted by bricko
bricko writes: Early explorer logbooks reveal Antarctic sea ice has barely changed in 100 years

Logbooks from the likes of Captain Robert Scott and Sir Ernest Shackleton — key figures in the 'Heroic Age' of Antarctic exploration — have revealed that sea ice levels in Antarctica have barely changed over the past century, despite global temperatures hitting record highs year after year.

Submission + - Microsoft's Skype locks out iTWire editor-in-chief (itwire.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Login issues at Skype have bitten iTWire, with editor-in-chief Stan Beer being told his account has been suspended. After 16 hours of waiting, he is still unable to log in, and Microsoft now says it has lost his account and all its data.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Deleting my Yahoo Account and keeping Flickr 2

Submitted by maxcelcat
maxcelcat writes: I have a Yahoo account and associated email address, which I never use. I'm even less inclined to use it now given the gigantic data breach from hell. I've distrusted Yahoo email for years anyway, after no less than three of my relatives had their accounts hacked. I once spent an hour and half on Skype to my mother while she was in Stockholm sorting out her hacked account, after they'd spammed her entire address book with requests for money.

Now, I want to delete my Yahoo account entirely, given my details might have been leaked. But I can't otherwise I also have to delete my ten year old Flickr account, and while you used to be able to log in with Facebook or Google, Flickr has since since disabled this feature!

I like Flickr and would prefer not to migrate from it. What should I do?

Submission + - New AI Is Capable of Beating Humans At Doom (denofgeek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Two students at Carnegie Mellon University have designed an artificial intelligence program that is capable of beating human players in a deathmatch game of 1993's Doom. Guillaume Lample and Devendra Singh Chaplot spent four months developing a program capable of playing first-person shooter games. The program made its debut at VizDoom (an AI competition that centered around the classic shooter) where it took second place despite the fact that their creation managed to beat human participants. That's not the impressive part about this program, however. No, what's really impressive is how the AI learns to play. The creator's full write-up on the program (which is available here) notes that their AI "allows developing bots that play the game using the screen buffer." What that means is that the program learns by interpreting what is happening on the screen as opposed to following a pre-set series of command instructions alone. In other words, this AI learns to play in exactly the same way a human player learns to play. This theory has been explored practically before, but Doom is arguably the most complicated game a program fueled by that concept has been able to succeed at. The AI's creators have already confirmed that they will be moving on to Quake, which will be a much more interesting test of this technologies capabilities given that Quake presents a much more complex 3D environment.

Submission + - 386BSD 1.0 and 2.0 released (386bsd.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Who could forget 386BSD? This precursor to the modern BSDs was once released along a series of articles on the Dr. Dobb's Journal in 1991. The last known public release was version 0.1. Until today, when Lynne Jolitz, one of the co-authors of 386BSD, released the source code to version 1.0 as well as 2.0 on Github.

386BSD takes us back to the days when you could count every file in your Unix distribution and more importantly, read and understand all of your OS source code.

386BSD is also the missing link between BSD and Linux. One can find fragments of Linus Torvalds's math emulation code in the source code of 386BSD. To paraphrase Linus: "If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened."

As of today, you can boot this OS off Qemu and have a go at it.

Submission + - Intel's Investment In FPGAs Could Pay Dividends In Microsoft Data Centers And AI (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: In June last year, Intel announced a $16.7B acquisition of chip designer Altera, a Silicon Valley bellwether known for producing FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays). Intel has already disclosed that it has plans to integrate FPGAs into Xeon processors, which will leverage Altera technology. Those processors are due to arrive later this year and they should allow Intel to build more specialized, configurable chips for accelerating different workloads. FPGAs feature an array of logic gates that can be programmed to perform a myriad of tasks, and they can be re-programmed on the fly, as new workloads emerge or compute demands and algorithms change. The flexibility inherent to FPGAs is also at the core of Microsoft's Project Catapult, which is a code-name for the technology behind Microsoft's hyperscale acceleration fabric for networking, security, cloud services and artificial intelligence. An FPGA can be programmed to accelerate the algorithms associated with the specialized workloads and data sets of each specific application. At first, FPGAs were used to accelerate Bing's Indexserve engine. Over 1600 servers were initially outfitted with FPGAs that were connected via a secondary network. The FPGAs were programmed to accelerate specific search-related algorithms and it resulted in major improvements in latency and a 50% reduction in the number of servers required to process workloads. A new architecture that enabled configurable clouds was eventually laid out and last year Microsoft ramped-up to large-scale production with FPGAs in Bing and Azure. Microsoft now also plans to employ Project Catapult FPGA accelerator boards in "nearly every new production server."

Submission + - How ITT Tech Screwed Students and Made Millions (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: This is a grim story about a company that screwed poor people, military veterans, and taxpayers to turn a profit. It includes shocking details about the inner-working of the for-profit college including stuff like this:

"ITT recruiters even manipulated prospective students using pain-based sales techniques. Recruiters used a sales strategy called the “Pain Funnel” that encouraged them to ask progressively more hurtful questions to get prospective students to enroll in the school."

Submission + - ANTI-LITTERING APP 'LITTERGRAM' OFFENDED FACEBOOK BY USING 'GRAM' IN ITS BRAND N (liftlikes.com)

Submitted by Liftlikes
Liftlikes writes: Last year, Danny Lucas, a 49 year old guy from Wrotham, Kent launched an app that’s called Littergram. It’s basically an anti-littering app whose main goal is to eradicate litter from London. It emphasizes on people capturing, sharing and geo-tagging photos of litter they find on the streets of London.

The app is really admirable in its ambition but something about its name rubbed Facebook the wrong way. Facebook is not happy with the use of ‘gram’ in the brand name, as it is too similar to its product, Instagram.

Also, there is the matter of photo sharing and social features that are similar to that of Instagram too. The crux of the matter is that Facebook asked the owner of Littergram to change its name and remove ‘gram’ from it.

This thing is going on for a while and a few months back, Lucas publicly appealed to Mark Zuckerberg to change his mind and that “unreasonable demand to rebrand will kill our momentum at a time when support is building among councils and others”.

“I would like to hope that with your own personal ambitions to help our planet, that instead of spending money on lawyers and eliminating great causes such as Littergram, you will join forces with me and take this forward,” states Lucas.

The dispute seemed to be closed in May when Lucas did as the social media giant demanded and did not trademark his app’s name. He only trademarked it for t-shirts and bags, as per the agreement.

But now it seems that Facebook is still not happy and it has given Lucas a deadline to confirm that he is going to change the name of his app to something else which will not be a conflict with Facebook’s products.

Submission + - EU Commission Proposes Mandatory Piracy Filters For Online Services (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: During his State of the Union address today, EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker announced several plans (PDF) to modernize copyright law in Europe. One of the suggestions that has a lot of people worried is Article 13, which requires online services to police pirated content. This means that online services, which deal with large volumes of user-uploaded content, must use fingerprinting and filtering mechanisms to block copyright infringing files. While the Commission stresses that small content platforms won’t be subject to the requirement, the proposal doesn’t define what “small” means. It also fails to define what “appropriate” or “effective” content recognition systems are, creating a fair bit of uncertainty. Commenting on the proposal, Digital rights group EDRi says that it will put many European companies at risk while endangering users’ right to free speech. “The text that was launched today includes a proposal to potentially filter all uploads to the Internet in Europe. The draft text would destroy users’ rights and legal certainty for European hosting companies,” EDRi notes. The Commission, however, notes that the changes are needed to reinforce the negotiating position of copyright holders, so they can sign licensing agreements with services that provide access to user uploaded content.

Submission + - Wi-Fi speeds will triple, get more range with MegaMimo 2.0 (networkworld.com)

Submitted by Miche67
Miche67 writes: A new form of Wi-Fi called MegaMimo 2.0 will allow data to be shot through at three times the speed it travels now and twice as far, MIT researchers say. This next generation of MIMO W-Fi is expected to be released commercially soon.

The Wi-Fi technology, supposedly immune to bottleneck-causing interference, works by letting a number of distinct transmitters send same- and similar-frequency data “to multiple independent receivers without interfering with each other,” the computer scientists, led by Professor Dian Katabi from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), say in their news release.

MIMO is used commonly — when you make a cell phone call, for example. MIT's distributed MIMO system coordinates access points better, the researchers say.

It achieves the same as MIMO—which we already use in our smartphones, other mobile devices and Wi-Fi routers—but without the interference you’d normally get by using the same frequencies in the same session. Synchronizing the phases, time and frequencies by the algorithm cancels out the crashing signals.

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