Add a gun that can't shoot straight to the problems that dog Lockheed Martin's $428 billion F-35 program, including more than 800 software flaws. From a report: The 25mm gun on Air Force models of the Joint Strike Fighter has "unacceptable" accuracy in hitting ground targets and is mounted in housing that's cracking, the Pentagon's test office said in its latest assessment of the costliest U.S. weapons system. The annual assessment by Robert Behler, the Defense Department's director of operational test and evaluation, doesn't disclose any major new failings in the plane's flying capabilities. But it flags a long list of issues that his office said should be resolved -- including 13 described as Category 1 "must-fix" items that affect safety or combat capability -- before the F-35's upcoming $22 billion Block 4 phase.

The number of software deficiencies totaled 873 as of November, according to the report obtained by Bloomberg News in advance of its release as soon as Friday. That's down from 917 in September 2018, when the jet entered the intense combat testing required before full production, including 15 Category 1 items. What was to be a year of testing has now been extended another year until at least October. "Although the program office is working to fix deficiencies, new discoveries are still being made, resulting in only a minor decrease in the overall number" and leaving "many significant" ones to address, the assessment said.

Ars Technica recently ran a rebuttal by author, podcaster, coder, and "mercenary sysadmin" Jim Salter to some comments Linus Torvalds made last week about ZFS.

While it's reasonable for Torvalds to oppose integrating the CDDL-licensed ZFS into the kernel, Salter argues, he believes Torvalds' characterization of the filesystem was "inaccurate and damaging."
Torvalds dips into his own impressions of ZFS itself, both as a project and a filesystem. This is where things go badly off the rails, as Torvalds states, "Don't use ZFS. It's that simple. It was always more of a buzzword than anything else, I feel... [the] benchmarks I've seen do not make ZFS look all that great. And as far as I can tell, it has no real maintenance behind it any more..."

This jaw-dropping statement makes me wonder whether Torvalds has ever actually used or seriously investigated ZFS. Keep in mind, he's not merely making this statement about ZFS now, he's making it about ZFS for the last 15 years -- and is relegating everything from atomic snapshots to rapid replication to on-disk compression to per-block checksumming to automatic data repair and more to the status of "just buzzwords."

[The 2,300-word article goes on to describe ZFS features like per-block checksumming, automatic data repair, rapid replication and atomic snapshots -- as well as "performance wins" including its Adaptive Replacement caching algorithm and its inline compression (which allows datasets to be live-compressed with algorithms.]

The TL;DR here is that it's not really accurate to make blanket statements about ZFS performance, absent a very particular, well-understood workload to measure that performance on. But more importantly, quibbling about the fastest possible benchmark rather loses the main point of ZFS. This filesystem is meant to provide an eminently scalable filesystem that's extremely resistant to data loss; those are points Torvalds notably never so much as touches on....

Meanwhile, OpenZFS is actively consumed, developed, and in some cases commercially supported by organizations ranging from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (where OpenZFS is the underpinning of some of the world's largest supercomputers) through Datto, Delphix, Joyent, ixSystems, Proxmox, Canonical, and more...

It's possible to not have a personal need for ZFS. But to write it off as "more of a buzzword than anything else" seems to expose massive ignorance on the subject... Torvalds' status within the Linux community grants his words an impact that can be entirely out of proportion to Torvalds' own knowledge of a given topic -- and this was clearly one of those topics.

Gary Starkweather, engineer and inventor of the first laser printer, died on December 26 at the age of 81. The New York Times reports: Mr. Starkweather was working as a junior engineer in the offices of the Xerox Corporation in Rochester, N.Y., in 1964 -- several years after the company had introduced the photocopier to American office buildings -- when he began working on a version that could transmit information between two distant copiers, so that a person could scan a document in one place and send a copy to someone else in another. He decided that this could best be done with the precision of a laser, another recent invention, which can use amplified light to transfer images onto paper. But then he had a better idea: Rather than sending grainy images of paper documents from place to place, what if he used the precision of a laser to print more refined images straight from a computer? "What you have to do is not just look at the marble," he said in a talk at the University of South Florida in 2017. "You have to see the angel in the marble."

Because his idea ventured away from the company's core business, copiers, his boss hated it. At one point Mr. Starkweather was told that if he did not stop working on the project, his entire team would be laid off. "If you have a good idea, you can bet someone else doesn't think it's good," Mr. Starkweather would say in 1997 in a lecture for the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. But he soon finagled a move to the company's new research lab in Northern California, where a group of visionaries was developing what would become the most important digital technologies of the next three decades, including the personal computer as it is known today. At the Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, Mr. Starkweather built the first working laser printer in 1971 in less than nine months. By the 1990s, it was a staple of offices around the world. By the new millennium, it was nearly ubiquitous in homes as well.

An American scientist who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry just retracted their latest paper on Monday. Professor Arnold had shared the prize with George P Smith and Gregory Winter for their 2018 research on enzymes, reports the BBC (in an article shared by omfglearntoplay): It has been retracted because the results were not reproducible, and the authors found data missing from a lab notebook... "It is painful to admit, but important to do so. I apologize to all. I was a bit busy when this was submitted, and did not do my job well."

That same day, Science published a note outlining why it would be retracting the paper, which Professor Arnold co-authored with Inha Cho and Zhi-Jun Jia. "Efforts to reproduce the work showed that the enzymes do not catalyze the reactions with the activities and selectivities claimed. Careful examination of the first author's lab notebook then revealed missing contemporaneous entries and raw data for key experiments. The authors are therefore retracting the paper."
Professor Arnold is being applauded for acknowledging the mistake -- and has argued that science suffers when there's pressures not to:

"It should not be so difficult to retract a paper, and it should not be considered an act of courage to publicly admit it... We should just be able to do it and set the record straight... The very quick and widespread response to my tweets shows how strong the fear of doing the right thing is (especially among junior scientists). However, the response also shows that taking responsibility is still appreciated by most people."
Those remarks come from a Forbes article by the Professor of Health Policy and Management at the City University of New York. His own thoughts? What the heck happened with scientific research? Exploring, making and admitting mistakes should be part of the scientific process. Yet, Arnold's retraction and admission garnered such attention because it is a rare thing to do these days...

If you need courage to do what should be a routine part of science, then Houston and every other part of the country, we've got a problem. And this is a big, big problem for science and eventually our society... [T]ruly advancing science requires knowing about the things that didn't work out and all the mistakes that happened. These shouldn't stay hidden deep within the recesses of laboratories and someone's notebook.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A surveillance vendor that works with U.S. government agencies, such as the FBI, DEA, and ICE, is marketing spying capabilities to local police departments, including cameras that are hidden inside a tombstone, a baby car seat, and a vacuum cleaner. The brochure highlights some of the capabilities on offer to law enforcement agencies, from the novel to the sometimes straight-up bizarre. Special Services Group, the vendor behind the brochure, does not advertise its products publicly. Its logo is the floating-eye-in-pyramid logo seen on the back of the $1 bill, which conspiracy theorists associate with the Illuminati, and the company's slogan is "Constant Vigilance." The company is so secretive that, when asked for comment for this story, it threatened VICE with legal action if we published this article.

The brochure, dubbed "Black Book" by its authors, contains a cornucopia of surveillance devices. "The Tombstone Cam is our newest video concealment offering the ability to conduct remote surveillance operations from cemeteries," one section of the Black Book reads. The device can also capture audio, its battery can last for two days, and "the Tombstone Cam is fully portable and can be easily moved from location to location as necessary," the brochure adds. Another product is a video and audio capturing device that looks like an alarm clock, suitable for "hotel room stings," and other cameras are designed to appear like small tree trunks and rocks, the brochure reads. Other products include more traditional surveillance cameras and lenses as well as tools for surreptitiously gaining entry to buildings. The "Phantom RFID Exploitation Toolkit" lets a user clone an access card or fob, and the so-called "Shadow" product can "covertly provide the user with PIN code to an alarm panel," the brochure reads.

Astronomers have discovered a gigantic, undulating wave of dust and gas where newborn stars are forged over a 50 million billion mile stretch of the Milky Way. The Guardian reports: The gaseous structure, which holds more mass than 3 million suns, runs directly behind our solar system as viewed from the heart of the galaxy, but has eluded observation until now. The spectacular string of stellar nurseries forms the largest known wave in the Milky Way and was announced, appropriately, at a scientific conference a stone's throw from the surf mecca of Waikiki beach in Hawaii.

Measurements of the wave show that it stretches over 9,000 light years and makes up what is known as the "local arm" of the Milky Way. Looking down on the flat disc of the galaxy, the wave appears as a straight line about 400 light years wide. But from the side, it rises and falls 500 light years above and below the plane of the galaxy. For comparison, the width of the solar system is about half a light day -- the distance light travels in 12 hours. The discovery has thrown up a raft of questions, not least around how the wave formed. One idea is that a much smaller galaxy clattered into that part of the Milky Way in the far-flung past, setting off ripples that spread like those from a stone tossed into a pond. A more exotic hypothesis sees a role for the mysterious dark matter that lurks unseen around galaxies. The astronomers published their findings in the journal Nature.

Sony is working around the clock to manufacture its in-demand image sensors, but even a 24-hour operation hasn't been enough. From a report: For the second straight year, the Japanese company will run its chip factories constantly through the holidays to try and keep up with demand for sensors used in mobile phone cameras, according to Terushi Shimizu, the head of Sony's semiconductor unit. The electronics giant is more than doubling its capital spending on the business to 280 billion yen ($2.6 billion) this fiscal year and is also building a new plant in Nagasaki that will come online in April 2021. "Judging by the way things are going, even after all that investment in expanding capacity, it might still not be enough," Shimizu said in an interview at the Tokyo headquarters. "We are having to apologize to customers because we just can't make enough."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Big tech companies like Facebook and Alphabet's Google, long seen as some of the world's most desirable workplaces offering countless perks and employee benefits, are losing some of their shine. The Silicon Valley companies dropped out of the Top 10 "best places to work" in the U.S., according to Glassdoor's annual rankings released Tuesday. HubSpot, a cloud-computing software company, grabbed the No. 1 ranking while tech firms DocuSign and Ultimate Software were three and eight, respectively.

Facebook, which has been rated as the "best place to work" three times in the past 10 years, was ranked 23rd. It's the social-media company's lowest position since it first made the list in 2011 as the top-rated workplace. Facebook, based in Menlo Park, California, was ranked seventh last year. Google, voted "best place to work" in 2015 and a Top-10 finisher the previous eight years, came in at No. 11 on Glassdoor's list. Apple, once a consistent Top-25 finisher, was ranked 84th. Amazon, which has never been known for a positive internal culture, failed to make the list for the 12th straight year. Microsoft was one of the lone big technology companies to jump in the rankings. The Redmond, Washington-based software company moved to No. 21 from 34 a year ago. A few technology companies made the list for the first time, including SurveyMonkey at No. 33, Dell at No. 67 and Slack at No. 69. Here are the ten "best places to work" in 2020 in the U.S., according to Glassdoor:
1. HubSpot
2. Bain & Co.
3. DocuSign
4. In-N-Out Burger
5. Sammons Financial Group
6. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
7. Intuitive Surgical
8. Ultimate Software
9. VIPKid
10. Southwest Airlines

Amazon's next big step in health care is with voice transcription technology that's designed to allow doctors to spend more time with patients and less time at the computer. At Amazon Web Services' re:Invent conference on Tuesday, the company is launching a service called Amazon Transcribe Medical, which transcribes doctor-patient interactions and plugs the text straight into the medical record. From a report: "Our overarching goal is to free up the doctor, so they have more attention going to where it should be directed," said Matt Wood, vice president of artificial intelligence at AWS. "And that's to the patient." At last year's re:Invent, AWS introduced a related service called Amazon Comprehend Medical, which "allows developers to process unstructured medical text and identify information such as patient diagnosis, treatments, dosages, symptoms and signs, and more," according to a blog post. Wood said the two services are linked and can be used together. Voice-to-text transcription is one of the many areas where Amazon is battling with cloud rivals Microsoft and Google. All three companies operate speech assistants that can in real time translate spoken words and sentences and offer text translation. Businesses can use the technology in a variety of ways to weave into their applications.

[...] A big challenge for Amazon, a huge consumer company with tons of customer data, is ensuring that its health-care tools are compliant with privacy rules and regulations under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and when it comes to transcription, maintaining an extremely high level of accuracy to avoid problematic outcomes or potential liability. Imagine, for instance, if the machine learning system inputs the term "hyper" instead of "hypo," or if doctors noticed so many inaccuracies that they ended up doing the work manually anyway. Wood said the service is HIPAA compliant. He said it took a lot of work for the technology to correctly annotate the "domain specific language and abbreviations" that are common in the medical field, and added that the accuracy is very high. Amazon hasn't published research showing how its accuracy compares with other offerings, but Wood said the company hasn't ruled it out.

In a Quartz article, Adam Epstein writes about the filmmaking technology used to film The Mandalorian on Disney+: Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) -- the Lucasfilm subsidiary George Lucas founded in 1975 to make the visual effects for Star Wars -- deployed a real-time 3D projection system called "Stagecraft" on the Disney+ series that could, eventually, replace green-screen as the film industry standard for rendering virtual environments. The company has been testing Stagecraft for five years -- most recently on the Star Wars spin-off movie Solo in 2018. But The Mandalorian, the flagship series on Disney's new streaming service, likely marks the most extensive use yet of the new system.

Stagecraft's chief innovation is that it can project a 3D visual environment around the actors that changes in real time to match the perspective of the camera. When the camera moves, the background moves too, simulating the experience of filming in a different location. It's a significant upgrade from green-screen technology, which requires the filmmakers layer in a static image or footage after filming in front of the blank backdrop. [...] The tech has a wide range of benefits. For starters, it can draw better performances from the actors, who don't have to imagine the environment they are in, as they do when filming in front of green-screen. They can instantly be transported to any location, real or made-up, and feel as though they are there. And that's another big advantage: Stagecraft allows films and TV shows to simulate environments without actually having to send an entire production there to film. "One downside is that the displays used in Stagecraft require liquid crystals that take several years to grow," the report adds. "Growing and maintaining these crystals, which are the backbone of LCD (liquid crystal display) screens, can be expensive and time-consuming, perhaps complicating the attempts of other companies to adapt the technology."

This video from Unreal Engine shows a smaller scale version of the tech in action.

Facebook is once again offering a market research app, but this one appears to avoid some of the privacy concerns from before. From a report: The social media behemoth has introduced a Viewpoints app that pays you for completing surveys, research and other tasks that will help refine its products. Unlike Google's Opinion Rewards, you don't get the goods straight away -- instead, you earn points and automatically receive PayPal contributions whenever you reach point milestones. You don't have to worry about your rewards expiring, at least. Not surprisingly, Facebook wants to avoid claims that it's snooping on users without their full consent. You have to be at least 18 years old to use Viewpoints, and you'll be told what information is collected and how it's used. The company also vows not to sell data to third parties or publicly share your activity without permission.

The world's richest man made some interesting remarks Saturday when he became one of eight inductees into the International Air & Space Hall of Fame for founding the spaceflight services company Blue Origin in 2000.

The Times of San Diego reports: He described the origins of his space infatuation. Bezos said he told his high school paper he wanted to start a space company to save the environment and "eventually turn Earth into a national park." Saturday, he said: "I believe that, one day, Earth will be zoned residential and light industry. We'll move all heavy industry into space. That's the only way, really, to save this planet."

The 55-year-old Washington Post owner (and would-be NFL team buyer) invoked the story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. "You can't start an interesting space company in your dorm room," he said. "It's just too hard. It's too expensive. We want to change that." Reducing "the price of admission" to space is this generation's mission and his own, he said, "and the next generation will see a dynamic explosion of entrepreneurial talent the same way you have on the Internet."

His goal is "real operational usability" -- having rockets fly to space and return to earth (landing vertically as his Blue Shepards have done 10 times straight successfully) with regularity. Instead of disassembling and inspecting rockets after each flight, he said, the aim is making space trips "close to aircraft flight operations... You land, refuel and fly again." He said our grandkids' grandkids shouldn't have to face a planet that's "finite." "You want a dynamic civilization that continues to use more and more energy and more and more resources and build amazing things," he said.

"And to do that, you have to move out into the solar system."

Microsoft today started rolling out the free Windows 10 November 2019 Update. For those keeping track, this update is Windows 10 build 18363 and will bring Windows 10 to version 1909. From a report: The Windows 10 November 2019 Update (version 1909) is odd because it shares the same Cumulative Update packages as the Windows 10 May 2019 Update (version 1903). That means version 1909 will be delivered more quickly to version 1903 users -- it will install like a monthly security update. The build number will barely change: from build 18362 to build 18363. If two computers have the same servicing content, the build revision number should match: 18362.xxx and 18363.xxx. For developers, this means a new Windows SDK will not be issued in conjunction with this version of Windows (there aren't any new APIs).

Again, the Windows 10 November 2019 Update is not a typical release. It's a much smaller update, though it is still worth getting. Windows 10 version 1909 brings improvements to Windows containers, inking latency, and password recovery. User-facing features include letting third-party digital assistants to voice activate above the Lock screen, being able to create events straight from the Calendar flyout on the Taskbar, and displaying OneDrive content in the File Explorer search box. You may also notice some changes to notification management, better performance and reliability on certain CPUs, and battery life and power efficiency improvements.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As Xiaomi widens its smartphone lead over Samsung in India, a new competitor is increasingly posing a challenge. Realme, a one-and-half-year-old smartphone vendor that spun out of Oppo, commanded 14.3% of the world's second largest smartphone market in the quarter that ended in September, research firm IDC said on Monday. While Xiaomi, with 27.1% of the local smartphone market share, still dominates the market, the volume of handsets that Realme has shipped in India rose at a staggering 401.3% since the same period last year, according to IDC. What's fascinating about Realme's expansion in India is just how closely it is replicating Xiaomi's playbook in the country. Like Xiaomi, Realme for a year sold phones only through an online channel to cut overhead costs. Last quarter, the company began selling phones in India through offline stores, which still account for more than two-thirds of all smartphone sales.

[...] Realme has launched more than a dozen aggressively priced smartphone models so far, all priced between $80 to $240 -- the sweet spot in the local market. In fact, IDC says Realme's C2, 3i and 3 models -- priced between $80 and $110 -- were the top-selling phones for the company in Q3 this year. Realme today operates in 18 countries, including its home market China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Vietnam and Egypt. In May this year, the company entered the European region. In a report Counterpoint shared with its clients recently, the research firm said that based on the number of smartphones that Realme has shipped, the company's rank went from 47th in Q3 2018 to 7th as of September this year. By shipping more than 10 million smartphones, the Chinese firm's shipment grew by a whopping 808% during this period, the research firm said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Anxious couples are approaching fertility doctors in the US with requests for a hotly debated new genetic test being called "23andMe, but on embryos." The baby-picking test is being offered by a New Jersey startup company, Genomic Prediction, whose plans we first reported on two years ago. The company says it can use DNA measurements to predict which embryos from an IVF procedure are least likely to end up with any of 11 different common diseases. In the next few weeks it's set to release case studies on its first clients.

Handed report cards on a batch of frozen embryos, parents can use the test results to try to choose the healthiest ones. The grades include risk estimates for diabetes, heart attacks, and five types of cancer. According to flyers distributed by the company, it will also warn clients about any embryo predicted to become a person who is among the shortest 2% of the population, or who is in the lowest 2% in intelligence. The test is straight out of the science fiction film Gattaca, a movie that's one of the inspirations of the startup's CEO, Laurent Tellier. The company's other cofounders are testing expert Nathan Treff and Stephen Hsu, a Michigan State University administrator and media pundit. So far, fertility centers have not leaped at the chance to offer the test, which is new and unproven. Instead, prospective parents are learning about the designer baby reports through word of mouth or news articles and taking the company's flyer to their doctors. "The test (called "LifeView") is carried out on a few cells plucked from a days-old IVF embryo," the report says. "Then Genomic Prediction measures its DNA at several hundred thousand genetic positions, from which it says it can create a statistical estimate, called a 'polygenic score,' of the chance of disease later in life."

Criticism of the company from some genetics researchers has been intense. "It is irresponsible to suggest that the science is at the point where we could reliably predict which embryo to select to minimize the risk of disease. The science simply isn't there yet," says Graham Coop, a geneticist at the University of California, Davis, and a frequent critic of the company on Twitter.

A Boeing whistleblower has claimed that passengers on its 787 Dreamliner could be left without oxygen if the cabin were to suffer a sudden decompression. The BBC reports: John Barnett says tests suggest up to a quarter of the oxygen systems could be faulty and might not work when needed. He also claimed faulty parts were deliberately fitted to planes on the production line at one Boeing factory. Boeing denies his accusations and says all its aircraft are built to the highest levels of safety and quality. Mr Barnett, a former quality control engineer, worked for Boeing for 32 years, until his retirement on health grounds in March 2017. From 2010 he was employed as a quality manager at Boeing's factory in North Charleston, South Carolina.

In 2016, he tells the BBC, he uncovered problems with emergency oxygen systems. These are supposed to keep passengers and crew alive if the cabin pressurization fails for any reason at altitude. Breathing masks are meant to drop down from the ceiling, which then supply oxygen from a gas cylinder. Mr Barnett says that when he was decommissioning systems which had suffered minor cosmetic damage, he found that some of the oxygen bottles were not discharging when they were meant to. He subsequently arranged for a controlled test to be carried out by Boeing's own research and development unit. This test, which used oxygen systems that were "straight out of stock" and undamaged, was designed to mimic the way in which they would be deployed aboard an aircraft, using exactly the same electric current as a trigger. He says 300 systems were tested -- and 75 of them did not deploy properly, a failure rate of 25%. Mr Barnett also says that Boeing failed to follow its own procedures, intended to track parts through the assembly process, allowing a number of defective items to be "lost."

"He claims that under-pressure workers even fitted sub-standard parts from scrap bins to aircraft on the production line, in at least one case with the knowledge of a senior manager," reports the BBC. "He says this was done to save time, because 'Boeing South Carolina is strictly driven by schedule and cost.'"

A year ago, Google rolled out ".new" links that worked like shortcuts to instantly create new Google documents. For example, you could type "doc.new" (without the quotes) to create a new Google Doc or "sheet.new" to create a new spreadsheet. Today, Google announced it's bringing the .new shortcuts to the rest of the web. From a report: Now, any company or organization can register their own .new domain to generate a .new shortcut that works with their own web app. Several have already done so, including Microsoft, which now has "word.new" to start a new word document, or Spotify, which has "playlist.new" to start adding songs to a new playlist on its streaming app. The domains are designed to get users straight to the action. That is, instead of having to visit a service, sign in, then find the right menu or function, they could just start creating. However, some of today's new domains aren't quite as seamless as Google's own.

Russian scientists tracking migrating eagles ran out of money after some of the birds flew to Iran and Pakistan and their SMS transmitters drew huge data roaming charges. The BBC reports: After learning of the team's dilemma, Russian mobile phone operator Megafon offered to cancel the debt and put the project on a special, cheaper tariff. The team had started crowdfunding on social media to pay off the bills. The birds left from southern Russia and Kazakhstan. The journey of one steppe eagle, called Min, was particularly expensive, as it flew to Iran from Kazakhstan. Min accumulated SMS messages to send during the summer in Kazakhstan, but it was out of range of the mobile network. Unexpectedly the eagle flew straight to Iran, where it sent the huge backlog of messages.

The price per SMS in Kazakhstan was about 15 roubles (18p; 30 US cents), but each SMS from Iran cost 49 roubles. Min used up the entire tracking budget meant for all the eagles. Megafon's offer to bail out the team, reported by RIA Novosti news, means they can continue monitoring the eagles' routes, collecting vital data to help their survival.

Forbes senior contributor Jason Evangelho dedicated a whole article to a coming update for one Chinese-domestic Linux distribution: If you haven't been paying attention to a little Linux desktop distribution called Deepin, it's time to put it on your radar. Nevermind that Huawei chose Deepin to ship on their MateBook laptop lineup. Nevermind that Deepin Cloud Sync [for system settings] is a killer, forward-thinking feature that every Linux distro needs to adopt. Nevermind that its slide-out control center resembles something sexy and sensible straight out of the future. But looking toward 2020, Deepin is poised to be absolutely stunning.

This is without question the most beautiful desktop environment I've ever laid eyes on... For me, the UX is more intuitive and more enjoyable than macOS and Windows 10. And fortunately, a quick setting can also transform Deepin to resemble the traditional Windows or macOS desktop paradigms you're already comfortable with. Hell, even the installer is a breath of fresh air.

But let's take a peek at what's coming next. This week, the Deepin Linux Youtube channel quietly released a preview of its Deepin v20 Launcher (just one component of the forthcoming OS), and it's bound to turn some heads. Take a look [YouTube video]. It's merely a tease ahead of this November's expected Deepin v20 beta release, but the Deepin developers have apparently devoted most of 2019 working on the upcoming version. From the category-driven app browser and animations, to the basic desktop layout we see in the teaser video, things appear quite polished already.
The article points out that Deepin is also a stand-alone desktop environment for any current Linux distribution -- and that it's one of the 248 operating systems available for online testing at DistroTest.net.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Applications to some of America's most elite business schools fell at a steeper rate this year, as universities struggled to attract international students amid changes to immigration policies and political tensions between the U.S. and China. The declines affected some of the nation's top-rated programs, with Harvard University, Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among others, all reporting larger year-over-year drops in business-school applications. Some, such as Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business, posted double-digit percentage declines.

Overall, applications to American M.B.A. programs fell for the fifth straight year, according to new data from the nonprofit Graduate Management Admission Council, an association of business schools that administers the GMAT admissions test. In the latest academic cycle ended this spring, U.S. business schools received 135,096 applications for programs including the traditional master of business administration degree, down 9.1% from the prior year, according to an annual survey. Last year applications for U.S. business programs were down 7%.