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Submission + - A Designer Used AI and Photoshop to Bring Roman Emperors Back to Life (theverge.com)

Submitted by shirappu
shirappu writes: Daniel Voshart's work on creating life-life images of Roman emperors from their statues started as a quarantine project and quickly got out of hand. His portraits of the emperors (a collection of 54 as of July) are created using generative adversarial networks, which are fed images of the emperors from statues, coins, and paintings. These are then edited and tweaked based on historical descriptions, and reworked in photoshop, where Voshart says he can "avoid falling down the path into uncanny valley."

Voshart has written about the process himself here: https://medium.com/@voshart/ph...

Submission + - SPAM: Spare the Programming, Spoil High School CS? 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In A New Pedagogy to Address the Unacknowledged Failure of American Secondary CS Education (June ACM Inroads), Scott Portnoff argues that a big part of the problem is the survey nature of today's most popular high school CS course offerings — Exploring Computer Science (ECS) and AP Computer Science Principles (AP CSP) — both of whose foundational premise is that programming is just one of many CS topics. "Up until a decade ago," Portnoff explains, "introductory high school computer science classes were synonymous with programming instruction, period. No longer." This new status quo in secondary CS education, Portnoff argues, resulted from baseless speculation that programming was what made Java-based AP CS A inaccessible, opposed to, say, an uninspiring or pedagogically ineffective version of that particular curriculum, or a poorly prepared instructor. It's quite a departure from the 2011 CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards, which made the case for the centrality of programming in CS education ("Pedagogically, computer programming has the same relation to studying computer science as playing an instrument does to studying music or painting does to studying art. In each case, even a small amount of hands-on experience adds immensely to life-long appreciation and understanding"). So, spare the programming, spoil high school CS?

Submission + - New Horizons snaps pictures of Wolf 359 and Proxima Centauri, observes parallax (space.com)

Submitted by JoeRobe
JoeRobe writes: Space.com and other outlets are reporting on new pictures of Wolf 359 and Proxima Centauri sent back from New Horizons. The images show clear parallax between the view from Earth and from the spacecraft 6.9 billion km away. In effect, New Horizons is looking up at a visually different star field than we are.

This is not the first time stellar parallax has been observed (Hipparcos did this regularly), but thanks to the enormous distance between New Horizons and Earth it is the first time the parallax can be clearly seen with the naked eye. NASA has even created stereoscopic pairs to get a 3D view.

Submission + - Renewable energy policies actually work (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: For most of the industrial era, a nation's carbon emissions moved in lock step with its economy. Growth meant higher emissions. But over the past decade or so, that has changed. Even as the global economy continued to grow, carbon emissions remained flat or dropped a bit.

It would be simple to ascribe this trend o the explosion in renewable energy, but reality is rarely so simple. New research found that renewable energy use is a big factor, but so is reduced energy use overall. And for both of these factors, government policy appears to play a large role.

Submission + - Microsoft Announces First Paid-For $20 Linux Distro for Windows 10 October 2018 (wccftech.com)

Submitted by puddingebola
puddingebola writes: MIcrosoft is selling two linux distributions in the Windows store for Windows 10 Subsystem for Linux (WSL).WLinux is a Debian-based distro available for $19.99 from Microsoft Store. The company also announced Ubuntu 18.04, which will be available through the Microsoft Store, as well.

Submission + - Do older I.T. workers doing end-user support find it gets harder with age? 2

Submitted by King_TJ
King_TJ writes: I've worked in I.T. for almost 30 years now in various capacities, from bench PC technician to web page designer, support specialist, network manager, and was self-employed for a while doing on-site service and consulting too. In all that time, I've always felt like I had a good handle on troubleshooting and problem-solving while providing good, friendly customer service at the same time. But recently, I've started feeling like there's just a little too much knowledge to keep straight in my brain. If I'm able to work on a project on my own terms, without interruptions or distractions? Sure, I can get almost anything figured out. But it's the stress of users needing immediate assistance with random problems, thrown out willy-nilly in the constant barrage of trouble tickets, that I'm starting to struggle with.

For example, just this morning, a user had a question about whether or not she should open an email about quarantined junk mail to actually look through it. I briefly noted a screen shot she attached that showed a typical MS Office quarantined email message and replied that she could absolutely view them at her discretion. (I also noted that I tend to ignore and delete those myself, unless I'm actually expecting a specific piece of email that I didn't receive — in case it was actually in the junk mail filter.) Well, that was the wrong answer, because that message was a nicely done phishing attempt; not a legit message — and she tried to sign in through it. Then, I had to do a mad scramble to change her password and help her get the new one working on her phone and computer. With more time to think about what happened, I'm realizing now that I should have known the email was fake because we recently made some changes to our Office 365 environment so junk mail is going directly into Junk folders in Outlook — and those types of messages aren't really coming in to people anymore. On top of that? We're trying to migrate people to using 2 factor authentication so I was instructed to get this user on it while I'm changing her account info. Makes sense, but I had to dig all over to find our document with instructions on how to do that too. I just couldn't remember where they told me they saved the thing, several weeks ago, when they talked about creating the new document in one of our weekly meetings. Am I just getting old and starting to lose it? Is everybody feeling this way about I.T. support these days? Are things just changing at too quick a pace for anyone to stay on top of it all?

I mean, in just the last few weeks, we've dealt with users failing to get their single sign-on passwords to work because something broke that only an upgrade to the latest build of Windows 10 corrected. We've had an office network go bezerk and randomly drop people's Internet access, ability to print, etc. — because one of the switches started intermittently failing under load. We've had online training to set up a new MDM solution, company-wide. And I had to single-handedly set up a new server running the latest version of vCenter for our ESXi servers. And all of that's while trying to get in some studying on the side to get my Security Plus cert., getting Macs with broken screens mailed out for service, a couple of new computers deployed, and accounts properly shut down for an employee who left, plus the usual grind of "mindless" tickets like requests to create new shared DropBox team folders for groups. It's a LOT to juggle, but I was pretty happy with my ability to keep all of it moving right along for years. Now — I'm starting to have doubts.

Submission + - Data science and the search for MH370

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: How often are mathematicians heroes? Here's an example where scientists are... not exactly saving the day. But employing technology for good, certainly.

In the absence of physical evidence, scientists are employing powerful computational tools to attempt to solve the greatest aviation mystery of our time: the disappearance of flight MH370.

For example:

A DSTG team led by mathematician Dr. Neil Gordon set about developing a new technique to extract a path from a subset of the Inmarsat data called the Burst Timing Offset (BTO). This measured how quickly the aircraft responded each time the satellite pinged it, and was used to determine the distance between the satellite and the plane. Investigators used these calculations to draw a set of rings on the earth’s surface.

...The DSTG used its computers to generate a huge number of possible routes and then test them to see which best fit the observed data. Their endpoints were pooled to generate a probabilistic “heat map” of the plane’s most likely resting places using a technique called Bayesian analysis. These calculations allowed the DSTG team to draw a box 400 miles long and 70 miles across, which contained about 90 percent of the total probability distribution.

Cool stuff, even if we still don't know where the plane ended up.

Submission + - Lost Turing letters give unique insight into his academic life prior to death (manchester.ac.uk)

Submitted by bellwould
bellwould writes: "...the letters do give a unique glimpse into his every day working life at the time of these events. Plus, some documents also give a brief insight into some of his more forthright personal opinions. For example, his response to a conference invitation to the US in April 1953 is simply, “I would not like the journey, and I detest America”."

Submission + - Linux kernel hardeners Grsecurity sue open source's Bruce Perens (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Our customer contract doesn't violate GPLv2, biz insists in defamation lawsuit

In late June, noted open-source programmer Bruce Perens warned that using Grsecurity's Linux kernel security could invite legal trouble.

"As a customer, it's my opinion that you would be subject to both contributory infringement and breach of contract by employing this product in conjunction with the Linux kernel under the no-redistribution policy currently employed by Grsecurity," Perens wrote on his blog.

The following month, Perens was invited to court. Grsecurity sued the open-source doyen, his web host, and as-yet-unidentified defendants who may have helped him draft that post, for defamation and business interference.

Grsecurity offers Linux kernel security patches on a paid-for subscription basis. The software hardens kernel defenses through checks for common errors like memory overflows. Perens, meanwhile, is known for using the Debian Free Software Guidelines to draft the Open Source Definition, with the help of others.

Linus Torvalds, who oversees the Linux kernel, has called Grsecurity's patches "garbage".

(read the rest at el reg)
https://www.theregister.co.uk/...

https://lwn.net/Articles/72980...

Submission + - Microsoft continues earning money from Linux -- increases patent licensing agree (betanews.com) 1

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Many people — let's call them 'haters' — like to make fun of Microsoft's mobile market share with Windows Phone. True, the platform is a failure in this regard, but many users of the OS like it. Quite frankly, besides the lack of apps, Windows Phone is a rather smart and well-designed operating system.

If you choose to laugh at Microsoft over its mobile presence, feel free, but please know that Microsoft is laughing too; all the way to the bank. What you may not know is, Microsoft makes money from Android handset sales thanks to its patent portfolio. In fact, it also collects money from Chromebooks too. In other words, Microsoft is profiting from Linux, since both operating systems are based on the kernel. Today, Microsoft increases its number of patent licensing agreements, by making a deal with Qisda Corp.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Recommend Laptop To Support Physics Research

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I am a long-time reader of Slashdot, and a first-time submitter. My daughter is in her 3rd year of college as a physics major. She has an internship in Europe this summer, will graduate next year, and continue with graduate physics studies. Her area of research interest is in gravitational waves and particle physics.

She currently has a PC laptop running Win7 and wants to buy a new laptop. She would like use Linux on it, and plans to use it for C++ programming, data analysis and simulations (along with the usual email, surfing, music, pictures, etc) For all of the physics slash-dotters out there, what should she get? PC? Mac? What do you recommend for running Linux? For a C++ development environment? What laptop do you use and how is it configured to support your physics-related activities?

Submission + - Programmers: It's OK to Grow Up

Submitted by Nemo the Magnificent
Nemo the Magnificent writes: From the Peter-Pan-need-not-apply dept.

Everybody knows software development is a young man's game, right? Here's a guy who hires and manages programmers and he says it's not about age at all, it's about skills, period. A company that actively works to offer all employees the chance to learn and to engage with modern technologies is a company that good people are going to work for, and to stay at.

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