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Comment Fedora independence threatened (Score 1) 20

I have been using Red Hat/Fedora Core/Fedora for longer than I can remember. It has always been my favorite distro, despite dalliances with Debian and Arch over the years. I, along with 4 or 5 other people, posted comments on a Fedora Magazine article to the effect that the HelloTux Fedora gear is wildly overpriced. My comments, along with the other negative comments were immediately removed after posting. This, combined with the fact that the owner of HelloTux wrote the article, but didn't note it was his company, makes me feel very uncomfortable about Fedora's open stance since the IBM acquisition. There have been other instances, like the article promoting IBM's cloud offerings, that makes me as a lifelong Linux user squeamish. If Fedora Magazine is now going to promote Advertising as legitimate articles by not disclosing the author's stake in the product, what else are they not being open with users about.

Submission + - AMD Unveils EPYC Server CPUs, Ryzen Mobile, ThreadRipper & Vega Frontier Edi (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Today at its financial analyst day, AMD lifted the veil on a number of new products based on the company's Zen CPU architecture and next generation Vega GPU architecture. AMD CEO Lisa Su lifted a very large server chip in the air that the company now has branded EPYC. AMD is going for the jugular when it comes to comparisons with Intel's Xeon family, providing up to 128 PCI Express 3.0 lanes, which Su says "allows you to connect more GPUs directly to the CPU than any other solution in the industry." EPYC currently scales to 32 cores/64 threads per socket and supports up to 8-channel DDR4 memory (16 DIMMs per CPU, up to 4TB total memory support). AMD also confirmed the previously rumored ThreadRipper CPU, a 16-core/32-thread beast of a chip for the enthusiast desktop PC space. AMD's Raja Koduri, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect for Radeon Technologies Group, also unveiled Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, a workstation and pro graphics card targeted at VR content creation, visualization and machine learning. Radeon Vega Frontier Edition offers 13 TFLOPS of FP32 throughput, 25 TFLOPS of FP16 performance and is powered by 64 computer units and 16GB of HMB2 memory for about 480GB/sec of memory bandwidth. The cards are expected to ship in June but there was no word just yet on when consumer versions of Vega will hit. Finally, AMD also shared info on Ryzen Mobile, which will incorporate both the Zen CPU architecture and an integrated Vega GPU core. Compared to AMD's 7th generation APUs, AMD claims Ryzen Mobile will up CPU performance by 50 percent while offering 40 percent better graphics performance. AMD also claimed those gains will not come at the expense of battery life, with a 50 percent reduction in power consumption, which reportedly will pave the way for faster, longer lasting premium notebooks and 2-in-1 devices.

Submission + - Chelsea Manning Set To Be Released From Prison, 28 Years Early (nbcnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning is set to walk out of prison Wednesday — but she won't be entirely free. Manning's 35-year sentence for leaking an enormous trove of military intelligence records was commuted by President Barack Obama in January. But Manning is still appealing her conviction in a case that could take years, and the government has yet to respond to the appeal. And all the while, Private First Class Manning, 29, will remain an active duty soldier in the U.S. Army. She won't be paid a salary, and it's highly unlikely that she will be called to serve. But being placed on voluntary excess leave rather than discharged, says one of her attorneys, makes her vulnerable to new military punishment or charges if she steps out of line. Such an offense could be anything from getting into a fistfight to revealing previously unreleased classified information. Manning could even get into trouble with the military for speaking and writing. The Army private then known as Bradley Manning was just 22-year-old when she leaked nearly 750,000 military files and cables to WikiLeaks. Manning was court-martialed and sentenced in 2013 to 35 years in prison, with opportunity for parole after seven years served. n a statement given to the TODAY show the day after sentencing, Manning came out as a transgender woman. Last Tuesday, in Manning's first official statement about her plans after prison, she said, "I can see a future for myself as Chelsea."

Submission + - U.S. law allows low H-1B wages; just look at Apple (networkworld.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: If you work at Apple's One Infinite Loop headquarters in Cupertino as a computer programmer on an H-1B visa, you can can be paid as little as $52,229. That's peanuts in Silicon Valley. Average wages for a programmer in Santa Clara County are more than $93,000 a year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, the U.S. government will approve visa applications for Silicon Valley programmers at $52,229 — and, in fact, did so for hundreds of potential visa holders at Apple alone. To be clear, this doesn't mean there are hundreds of programmers at Apple working for that paltry sum. Apple submitted a form to the U.S. saying it was planning on hiring 150 computer programmers beginning June 14 at this wage. But it's not doing that.

Instead, this is a paperwork exercise by immigration attorneys to give an employer — in this case, Apple — maximum latitude with the H-1B laws. The forms-submittal process doesn't always reflect actual hiring goals or wage levels.

Apple didn't want to comment for the story, but it did confirm some things. It says it hires on the basis on qualifications and that all employees — visa holders and U.S. workers alike — are paid equitably and it conducts internal studies to back this up. There are bonuses on top of base pay. Apple may not be paying low wages to H-1B workers, but it can pay low wages to visa workers if it wanted. This fact is at the heart of the H-1B battle.

Submission + - Our obsession with trailers is making movies worse (cnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Our increasing obsession with trailers is changing how we watch movies. We're becoming audiences afraid of surprise, audiences that would rather watch movies we're certain we'll like than risk watching films that surprise us into love. In some cases, this fixation is even lowering the quality of movies themselves by encouraging bad filmmaking habits. The most extreme example happened when Warner Bros. released such a successful trailer for "Suicide Squad" it brought on the company that cut it to edit the whole film — dropping the director's original cut altogether. [...] Thanks to trailers' easy accessibility on YouTube and those shot-by-shot breakdowns that quickly appear online once trailers drop, anyone interested in a given flick can pore over all the available footage for hours — even if that leads to major spoilers for them and everyone they share it with.

Submission + - Barracuda Copy shuttting Down (barracuda.com)

Submitted by assaf07
assaf07 writes: I received a notification today that Barracuda's excellent online storage option Copy will be shuttting down in May. A blog post by Rod Matthews, VP of Storage at Barracuda gives the usual business doublespeak excuse. Having used Google's Drive, Box, Dropbox, and Spideroak, I am very disappointed to lose Copy as it's native Linux, Android, IOS, and Windows clients are/were wonderful

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