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Euro-Office Wants To Replace Google Docs and Microsoft Office (howtogeek.com)

Posted by BeauHD from the docs-without-the-dependency dept.
Euro-Office is a new open-source project supported by several European companies that aims to offer a "truly open, transparent and sovereign solution for collaborate document editing," using OnlyOffice as a starting point. The project is positioned around European digital independence and familiar Office-style editing, though it has already drawn pushback from OnlyOffice over alleged licensing violations. "The company behind OnlyOffice is also based in Russia, and Russia is still heavily sanctioned by most European nations due to the country's ongoing invasion of Ukraine," adds How-To Geek. From the report: Euro-Office is a new open-source project supported by Nextcloud, EuroStack, Wiki, Proton, Soverin, Abilian, and other companies based in Europe. The goal is to build an online office suite that can open and edit standard Microsoft Office documents (DOCX, PPTX, XLSX) and the OpenDocument format (ODS, ODT, ODP) used by LibreOffice and OpenOffice. The current design is remarkably close to Microsoft Office and its tabbed toolbars, so there shouldn't be much of a learning curve for anyone used to Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.

Importantly, Euro-Office is only the document editing component. It's designed to be added to cloud storage services, online wikis, project management tools, and other software. For example, you could have some Word documents in your Nextcloud file storage, and clicking them in a browser could open the Euro-Office editor. That way, Nextcloud (or Proton, or anyone else) doesn't have to build its own document editor from scratch.

Euro-Office is based on OnlyOffice, which is open-source under the AGPL license. The project explained that "Contributing is impossible or greatly discouraged" with OnlyOffice's developers, with outside code changes rarely accepted, so a hard fork was required. The company behind OnlyOffice is also based in Russia, and Russia is still heavily sanctioned by most European nations due to the country's ongoing invasion of Ukraine. The project's home page explains, "A lot of users and customers require software that is not potentially influenced or controlled by the Russian government." As for why OnlyOffice was chosen over LibreOffice, the project simply said: "We believe open source is about collaboration, and we look for opportunities to integrate and collaborate with the LibreOffice community and companies like Collabora."

UPDATE: Slashdot reader Elektroschock shares a statement from OnlyOffice CEO Lev Bannov, expressing his concerns about the Euro-Office inclusion of its software with trademarks removed: "We liked the AGPL v3 license because its 7th clause allows us to ensure that our code retains its original attributes, so that users are able to clearly identify the developers and the brand behind the program..."

Bannov continued: "The core issue here isn't just about what the AGPL license states, but about the additional provisions we, as the authors, have included. This is a critical distinction, even if some may argue otherwise. We firmly assert that the Euro-Office project is currently infringing on our copyright in a deliberate and unacceptable manner."

"As the creators of ONLYOFFICE, we want to make our position unequivocally clear: we do not grant anyone the right to remove our branding or alter our open-source code without proper attribution. This principle is non-negotiable and will never change. We demand that the Euro-Office project either restore our branding and attributions or roll back all forks of our project, refraining from using our code without proper acknowledgment of ONLYOFFICE."

Comment Elon Musk is going to dump 1.5 trillion (Score 2) 29

Of bad stock into your 401k. The YouTuber Patrick Boyle has a detailed video on the subject.

Basically SpaceX is going to be valued at 1.5 trillion. However it is impossible for it to reach that valuation in the real world.

SpaceX already has all the launch customers that can possibly get even under the best case scenario. And in unfavorable administration would almost certainly start looking for alternatives because Elon meddled in a war.

So the only possible growth sector for SpaceX is launching its own satellites, specifically the ones for internet.

But that's a dead end too because there aren't enough customers who can afford high-speed internet and also do not have access to some form of landline based internet like cable or DSL

the only other growth sector would be AI bullshit but Elon has lost most of his engineers to other companies. SpaceX got this huge boost because Elon had a mystique and he was talking about going to Mars so a shitload of rocket engineers took lower pay than they could get in any other job and work longer hours to work for spacex. That isn't happening with elon's AI companies. So he can't compete and the stuff he's building is barely better than what you could build yourself and run off your own GPU.

Everybody knows this, at least everybody who is investing that kind of money, so in order to get the kind of money he wants he's doing a weird stock scheme that limits access to the stock in order to drive up the price. Basically a few insiders will get all the profit and it's going to leave a huge amount of worthless stock that needs to be sent somewhere.

Normally it would be dumped into public pensions but those have been maxed out with bad stock already. So we are 401K is going to get hammered.

This is just the largest of many scams that are going to loot your retirement and there's basically nothing you can do about it except vote for pro-consumer politicians who want to regulate Wall Street but that's going to be annoying people like Elizabeth Warren and AOC and Bernie Sanders and frankly people don't like them... And in politics likeability is basically everything now.

What I'm saying is that if you are retiring or even if you're just retired you're a fucked. You have money and somebody wants it and they're going to get it
Government

US Paves Way For Private Assets To Be Included In 401(k) Retirement Plans (reuters.com) 29

Posted by BeauHD from the what-could-go-wrong dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Trump administration on Monday issued a long-awaited proposed rule to open up retirement plans to alternative assets, paving the way for private equity and cryptocurrencies to be added to 401(k) accounts. The measure, announced by the U.S. Department of Labor, is intended to ease longstanding barriers to incorporating these less liquid and less transparent assets into American retirement plans. It follows an executive order from President Donald Trump last summer and could clear the way for alternative asset management firms to tap a large new source of capital.

Industry groups have argued private market investments can enhance long-term returns and diversification for retirement savers, while skeptics warn higher fees, complexity and limited liquidity could limit those gains and pose risks for retail investors. Some private market funds that are already available to wealthier individual investors have shown signs of strain in recent months. Private credit funds known as business development companies have seen a wave of withdrawals. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the proposed rule was "an initial step" and aimed to be "mindful of the importance of protecting retirement assets."

The guidance lays out how plan trustees, who have a legal fiduciary duty to act in the best interest of members, can incorporate these assets. They would have to "objectively, thoroughly, and analytically consider, and make determinations on factors including performance, fees, liquidity, valuation, performance benchmarks, and complexity," the DOL said. Trustees who abide by them will be granted safe harbor that protects them from lawsuits, it added. The Supreme Court agreed earlier this year to hear one such case filed in 2019 by a former Intel employee claiming trustees made "imprudent" decisions by investing in hedge funds and private equity funds.

Comment Re: Latex schmubs (Score 0) 34

In this case it would be easy enough to calculate how much anything would be off and then use the existing data.

Remember we're not talking about science here we're talking about public policy. So yeah the scientists can go ahead and redo all the experiments just to confirm the numbers and that's something scientists will want to do.

But we're not going to find all of a sudden that micro plastics are good for you. Neither are we going to find that they are in such low quantities that they aren't harmful. At best this is going to slightly skew the results.

But this isn't like radiometric dating where there are are all sorts of caveats because of how that science works. At the end of the day you've still got a brain full of plastic it's just potentially slightly less plastic.

But as usual just like when cigarettes were discovered to be killing people the plastic industry is going to hammer us with stories about this and slow down and the attempt at reform for at least another 50 years. And just like the cigarette industry, assuming our civilization survives what's happening right now that is, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren are going to look back at this time and say what the fuck was wrong with those people?
Space

Quadratic Gravity Theory Reshapes Quantum View of Big Bang (phys.org) 24

Posted by BeauHD from the new-takes dept.
Researchers at the University of Waterloo say a new "quadratic quantum gravity" framework could explain the universe's rapid early expansion without adding extra ingredients to Einstein's theory by hand. The idea is especially notable because it makes testable predictions, including a minimum level of primordial gravitational waves that future experiments may be able to detect. "Even though this model deals with incredibly high energies, it leads to clear predictions that today's experiments can actually look for," said Dr. Niayesh Afshordi, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Waterloo and Perimeter Institute (PI). "That direct link between quantum gravity and real data is rare and exciting." Phys.org reports: The research team found that the Big Bang's rapid early expansion can emerge naturally from this simple, consistent theory of quantum gravity, without adding any extra ingredients. This early burst of expansion, often called inflation, is a central idea in modern cosmology because it explains why the universe looks the way it does today.

Their model also predicts a minimum amount of primordial gravitational waves, which are tiny ripples in spacetime geometry created in the first moments after the Big Bang. These signals may be detectable in upcoming experiments, offering a rare chance to test ideas about the universe's quantum origins.

[...] The team plans to refine their predictions for upcoming experiments to explore how their framework connects to particle physics and other puzzles about the early universe. Their long-term goal is to strengthen the bridge between quantum gravity and observational cosmology. The research has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Science

Scientists Shocked To Find Lab Gloves May Be Skewing Microplastics Data (sciencedaily.com) 34

Posted by BeauHD from the false-positives dept.
Researchers found that common nitrile and latex lab gloves can shed stearate particles that closely resemble microplastics, potentially "increasing the risk of false positives when studying microplastic pollution," reports ScienceDaily.

"We may be overestimating microplastics, but there should be none," said Anne McNeil, senior author of the study and U-M professor of chemistry, macromolecular science and engineering. "There's still a lot out there, and that's the problem." From the report: Researchers found that these gloves can unintentionally transfer particles onto lab tools used to analyze air, water, and other environmental samples. The contamination comes from stearates, which are not plastics but can closely resemble them during testing. Because of this, scientists may be detecting particles that are not true microplastics. To reduce this issue, U-M researchers Madeline Clough and Anne McNeil recommend using cleanroom gloves, which release far fewer particles.

Stearates are salt-based, soap-like substances added to disposable gloves to help them separate easily from molds during manufacturing. However, their chemical similarity to certain plastics makes them difficult to distinguish in lab analyses, increasing the risk of false positives when studying microplastic pollution. "For microplastics researchers who have these impacted datasets, there's still hope to recover them and find a true quantity of microplastics," said researcher and recent doctoral graduate Madeline Clough. "This field is very challenging to work in because there's plastic everywhere," McNeil said. "But that's why we need chemists and people who understand chemical structure to be working in this field."

The findings have been published in the journal Analytical Methods.

Submission + - US Paves Way For Private Assets To Be Included In 401(k) Retirement Plans (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Trump administration on Monday issued a long-awaited proposed rule to open up retirement plans to alternative assets, paving the way for private equity and cryptocurrencies to be added to 401(k) accounts. The measure, announced by the U.S. Department of Labor, is intended to ease longstanding barriers to incorporating these less liquid and less transparent assets into American retirement plans. It follows an executive order from President Donald Trump last summer and could clear the way for alternative asset management firms to tap a large new source of capital.

Industry groups have argued private market investments can enhance long-term returns and diversification for retirement savers, while skeptics warn higher fees, complexity and limited liquidity could limit those gains and pose risks for retail investors. Some private market funds that are already available to wealthier individual investors have shown signs of strain in recent months. Private credit funds known as business development companies have seen a wave of withdrawals. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the proposed rule was "an initial step" and aimed to be "mindful of the importance of protecting retirement assets."

The guidance lays out how plan trustees, who have a legal fiduciary duty to act in the best interest of members, can incorporate these assets. They would have to "objectively, thoroughly, and analytically consider, and make determinations on factors including performance, fees, liquidity, valuation, performance benchmarks, and complexity," the DOL said. Trustees who abide by them will be granted safe harbor that protects them from lawsuits, it added. The Supreme Court agreed earlier this year to hear one such case filed in 2019 by a former Intel employee claiming trustees made "imprudent" decisions by investing in hedge funds and private equity funds.
AI

AI Data Centers Can Warm Surrounding Areas By Up To 9.1C 51

Posted by BeauHD from the would-you-look-at-that dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Andrea Marinoni at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues saw that the amount of energy needed to run a data centre had been steadily increasing of late and was likely to "explode" in the coming years, so wanted to quantify the impact. The researchers took satellite measurements of land surface temperatures over the past 20 years and cross-referenced them against the geographical coordinates of more than 8400 AI data centers. Recognizing that surface temperature could be affected by other factors, the researchers chose to focus their investigation on data centers located away from densely populated areas.

They discovered that land surface temperatures increased by an average of 2C (3.6F) in the months after an AI data center started operations. In the most extreme cases, the increase in temperature was 9.1C (16.4F). The effect wasn't limited to the immediate surroundings of the data centers: the team found increased temperatures up to 10 kilometers away. Seven kilometers away, there was only a 30 percent reduction in the intensity. "The results we had were quite surprising," says Marinoni. "This could become a huge problem."

Using population data, the researchers estimate that more than 340 million people live within 10 kilometers of data centers, so live in a place that is warmer than it would be if the data centre hadn't been built there. Marinoni says that areas including the Bajio region in Mexico and the Aragon province in Spain saw a 2C (3.6F) temperature increase in the 20 years between 2004 and 2024 that couldn't otherwise be explained. University of Bristol researcher Chris Preist said the findings may be more complicated than they look. "It would be worth doing follow-up research to understand to what extent it's the heat generated from computation versus the heat generated from the building itself," he says. For example, the building being heated by sunlight may be part of the effect.

The findings of the study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, can be found on arXiv.

Comment Re: Reviewing code is more effort than writing cod (Score 1) 72

by DamnOregonian (#66069882) Attached to: Life With AI Causing Human Brain 'Fry'
The code they write is an absolute shit-show for a number of reasons.
You can get work done, if you don't mind the glaring fucking inefficiency of it- time wasted trying to coax it into doing what you want, how you want it- more spaghetti-at-the-wall write-test cycles than you'd expect for a first-year programmer, glaring logic errors that you need to correct (that to be fair, usually come from a lack of fleshed-out instruction on your part- but still, if my instructions are larger than the code, what prize have I won?), but I do find that they're quite alright at having a chunk of code stuffed into their context and coming up with unit tests for everything they notice within it. Sometimes they even surprise me and come up with tests for things I didn't think of.

Comment Facebook doesn't really care too much (Score 1) 111

About losing those lawsuits. They can absorb the fines and work around them. After a little bit of finagling the dollar amounts involved will not be terribly large. But on the other hand, and they have called this out in their sec filings, this basically makes it borderline impossible for any competitor to go up against them. In the long run it's probably going to save them money because traditionally the way they survive is by buying up whichever competitor of theirs the kids under 15 flocked to in order to find a place their parents didn't hang out

It's like how Microsoft lost their antitrust trial and the "punishment" was to give away millions of dollars of software to schools which they had been trying to get to take their software for 20 years...

I don't know what the opposite of a pyrrhic victory but I believe we've found it.

Comment Do a little bit of googling (Score 1) 111

You will find that every single one of those age gate laws was written by a lobbying firm tied to Facebook.

There is no question that the age restriction laws are coming from facebook. Also Planitir. They are also behind some of the funding for lobbying for the laws. They use what's called template laws where they write a legal template that can be sent across the country to form the basis of laws that pass everywhere.

No we don't exactly know why. But it doesn't take a lot to figure out. It doesn't really drastically improve their tracking but what it does do is let them know that you are real. That's why we know it's about detecting AI slop.

Submission + - AI Data Centers Can Warm Surrounding Areas By Up To 9.1C (newscientist.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Andrea Marinoni at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues saw that the amount of energy needed to run a data centre had been steadily increasing of late and was likely to “explode” in the coming years, so wanted to quantify the impact. The researchers took satellite measurements of land surface temperatures over the past 20 years and cross-referenced them against the geographical coordinates of more than 8400 AI data centres. Recognizing that surface temperature could be affected by other factors, the researchers chose to focus their investigation on data centers located away from densely populated areas.

They discovered that land surface temperatures increased by an average of 2C (3.6F) in the months after an AI data center started operations. In the most extreme cases, the increase in temperature was 9.1C (16.4F). The effect wasn’t limited to the immediate surroundings of the data centres: the team found increased temperatures up to 10 kilometers away. Seven kilometers away, there was only a 30 percent reduction in the intensity. “The results we had were quite surprising,” says Marinoni. “This could become a huge problem.”

Using population data, the researchers estimate that more than 340 million people live within 10 kilometers of data centers, so live in a place that is warmer than it would be if the data centre hadn’t been built there. Marinoni says that areas including the Bajío region in Mexico and the Aragon province in Spain saw a 2C (3.6F) temperature increase in the 20 years between 2004 and 2024 that couldn’t otherwise be explained.

Comment Re:Manus (Score 1) 33

The ones I have been in don't talk anything like that. And I've been in many.

Not that many apparently.
They talk like that in the board room, they talk like that when it's 2 CEOs out for a drink (and you got drug along, since you're the Chief Engineer), and they talk that way when they're just shooting the shit.
Hanging out with groups of executives in Vegas during conventions leads me to want to fucking kill myself. It's not human conversation. It's weird cosplaying.

The different scopes involve different speaking terms, those with a military bent have one set of recurring terms. Technology based boards, another. Marketing yet another, along with fiduciary involved boards. Some of the groups I have been in have significant overlap.

Board of directors. You're crossing boards and groups, and it has confused you.

Once you have been in a field, you end up getting used to the terms used, and they are logical.

Bullshit.

"Manus is the action engine that goes beyond answers to execute tasks, automate workflows, and extend your human reach." Now that is bullshit. And if someone said that in a board I'm on,, I'd tell them it was bullshit.

And if you said that to the person who said it in the board of directors that I sit on, that would be the last thing you ever said in it, and subsequently, that position.

What boards have you served on to gain that unassailable knowledge?

Board of Directors for a medium sized LLC, and smaller LLCs that we acquired before dissolving.
Windows

Microsoft Plans To Build 100% Native Apps For Windows 11 (techspot.com) 79

Posted by BeauHD from the change-in-direction dept.
Microsoft is reportedly shifting Windows 11 app development back toward fully native apps. Rudy Huyn, a Partner Architect at Microsoft working on the Store and File Explorer, said in a post on X that he is building a new team to work on Windows apps. "You don't need prior experience with the platform.. what matters most is strong product thinking and a deep focus on the customer," he wrote. "If you've built great apps on any platform and care about crafting meaningful user experiences, I'd love to hear from you." Huyn later said in a reply on X that the new Windows 11 apps will be "100% native." TechSpot reports: The description stands out at a time when many of Microsoft's built-in tools, including Clipchamp and Copilot, rely on web technologies and Progressive Web App architectures. The company's commitment to native performance suggests that some long-standing frustrations around responsiveness, memory use, and interface consistency could finally be addressed.

For Windows developers, Huyn's comments hint at a change in direction. Microsoft's recent development priorities have leaned heavily on web-based approaches, with Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) replacing or supplementing many native programs. [...] Exactly which applications will be rebuilt, or how strictly "100% native" will be enforced, remains unclear. Some current Microsoft apps classified as native still depend on WebView for specific features. But the renewed emphasis already has developers paying attention.

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