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What was highest label on your first car speedometer?

  • 80 mph
  • 88 mph
  • 100 mph
  • 120 mph
  • 150 mph
  • it was in kph like civilized countries use you insensitive clod
  • Other (please specify in comments)

[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:48 | Votes:108

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday June 24 2018, @10:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the solo-failure dept.

Lucasfilm "Licking Their Wounds" But Not Halting 'Star Wars' Development

Mild spoilers in TFA about certain characters that appear in the film.

Disney and Lucasfilm are reassessing their plans for future Star Wars movies in the wake of the disappointing performance of Solo: A Star Wars Story, which is having to fight to make much more than $350 million worldwide, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter. "They haven't slowed down development," says a source with knowledge of Lucasfilm's thinking, "but they are licking their wounds."

Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and her team are regrouping and figuring out the direction of the movies beyond the final installment of the main series of films, Star Wars: Episode IX, which is scheduled for release Dec. 20, 2019. "It doesn't mean those spinoffs don't happen," says another insider of Solo's underperformance globally. "It just means they're trying to figure out how to make, and market, them differently."

[...] "They were developing anything and everything," says another exec. "It was a case of them stuffing so much sausage and not try to break the casing."

Meanwhile, Han Solo's blaster was sold for over 0.1% of the film's gross.

Also at Collider, Space.com, and Forbes (archive).

Related: Star Wars Franchise Loses Fourth Director in Two Years
Meet the New Star Wars IX Director: J. J. Abrams


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Sunday June 24 2018, @08:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the show-me-the-numbers dept.

The Ubuntu blog has a report on installation metrics:

We first announced our intention to ask users to provide basic, not-personally-identifiable system data back in February.  Since then we have built the Ubuntu Report tool and integrated it in to the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS initial setup tool.  You can see an example of the data being collected on the Ubuntu Report Github page.

At first login users are asked if they would like to send the information gathered and can preview that data if they wish.

One thing to point out is that this data is entirely from Ubuntu Desktop installs only and does not include users of Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Core, our cloud images, or any of the Ubuntu derivatives that do not include the ubuntu-report software in their installer.

For example, the average install took 18 minutes, but some systems were able to install in less than 8 minutes. Available RAM was most frequently reported at 4GB followed closely by 8GB, but there were systems reporting in with as little as 1GB and as much as 128GB.

How do your system(s) compare?


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Sunday June 24 2018, @05:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the fetch-the-popcorn dept.

From Raw Story

The National Park Service has approved an application for a year anniversary commemoration of Charlottesville's violent white supremacist rally to be held in Washington, DC.

DC's WUSA9 reported that NPS approved the application but has not yet issued permits for the rally set to be held at Lafayette Square, a seven-acre park just north of the White House. The event is to be organized by Jason Kessler, the organizer of the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville where 32-year-old Heather Heyer was hit and killed by an alleged white supremacist.

"This year we have a new purpose," Kessler said, discussing the upcoming rally. "That's to talk about the civil rights abuse that happened in Charlottesville, Virginia last year."

Kessler claimed it wasn't his fault that "that stuff happened," and said that in the months since the rally ostensibly intended to "defend" a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, "white civil rights" have taken a hit.

"We're not able to peacefully assemble. We're not able to speak," he told WUSA. "I keep telling people if your right to rally and your right to protest means that someone else's life might be in danger, then it is no longer free speech but it is hate speech."


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Sunday June 24 2018, @03:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the more-whoosh dept.

'Snapdragon 1000' chip may be designed for PCs from the ground up

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 850 processor may be intended for PCs, but it's still a half step -- it's really a higher-clocked version of the same processor you'd find in your phone. The company may be more adventurous the next time, though. WinFuture says it has obtained details surrounding SDM1000 (possibly Snapdragon 1000), a previously hinted-at CPU that would be designed from the start for PCs. It would have a relatively huge design compared to most ARM designs (20mm x 15mm) and would consume a laptop-like 12W of power across the entire system-on-a-chip. It would compete directly with Intel's low-power Core processors where the existing 835 isn't really in the ballpark.

By comparison, the Snapdragon 850 has a maximum TDP of just 6.5 Watts.

A reference design for the chip includes 16 GB of LPDDR4X memory, 2 × 128 GB of UFS 2.1 internal storage, and Gigabit WLAN.

See also: Snapdragon-based Chromebook could rival always-connected PCs

Related: Windows 10 PCs Running on Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 to Arrive this Year
First ARM Snapdragon-Based Windows 10 S Systems Announced
Snapdragon 845 Announced
Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 850 processor will arrive in Windows PCs this year


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Sunday June 24 2018, @01:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the that's-what-I-look-like! dept.

Nintendo only lets users choose from a limited number of preset profile pictures (or custom-made Miis) for their online avatar on the Switch network. So at least one Reddit user was quite surprised to see pornographic profile pictures showing up on the user-placed balloons in Super Mario Odyssey's online "Balloon World" mode.

"The picture was changed several times over the course of my time patrolling, each picture being pornographic content," Redditor ewaison writes, including links to (censored) screenshots of the offending profile pictures in their post. "There are multiple [sic] of these balloons all being made by the same user. This is obviously intentional, and made to upset children."

With the menu installed, users can load an arbitrary 256 x 256 resolution JPG onto their SD card and use a "Change Avatar" menu option to upload that file as their profile picture. Nintendo apparently stores (and then distributes) whatever gets uploaded directly on its servers rather than using some sort of internal ID tag to denote which preset profile picture should be used.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Sunday June 24 2018, @11:37AM   Printer-friendly
from the got-to-start-somewhere dept.

The GDPR is now in effect. This is an attempt (mostly good) to give people control over their personal data. Specifically, companies must ask you to opt-in to data collection, and you have the right to opt-out at any time.

Of course, too many companies are trying to abuse the situation. For example, I received several notices with an "accept" option that would opt-in to more ads, newsletters or data collection than I had before. I was particularly annoyed by the new Sonos privacy policy. It states that not opting-in to their full data collection means that your Sonos products will no longer work. Which, of course, makes no sense at all - there's no reason why a loudspeaker needs to send my music listening habits to the mothership.

This is an example of a practice called "forced consent", and is explicitly forbidden by the GDPR. Max Schrems, an Austrian attorney and privacy expert, has gone to war on exactly this kind of abuse. Just minutes after the GDPR came into effect, he filed separate complaints against Google, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp - all of which have similar forced-consent policies: opt-in or you cannot use their products.

Schrem's efforts are funded through noyb.eu (none of your business), which is a crowdfunded platform and organization that works for privacy rights online.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Sunday June 24 2018, @09:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the skirting-existing-laws dept.

The Center for American Progress reports

Before Stephen Paddock opened fire at a country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip last October, killing 58 and wounding hundreds, most Americans probably hadn't heard of bump-fire stocks--add-ons that lets a semiautomatic rifle fire as quickly as a machine gun. Until that mass shooting, they were a novelty known only among firing-range enthusiasts and Cool Gun YouTube.

Within months of Las Vegas, lawmakers introduced bipartisan legislation[1] to outlaw the devices, and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, or ATF, announced plans to ban them through regulation.[2]

But gun control advocates warn bump stocks are just one part of a much bigger problem. A flood of new gun technologies is pushing the envelope on what a civilian can legally own, skirting laws that have kept the most dangerous weapons off the street for decades.

[...] Weapons like machine guns, silencers, and short-barreled rifles and shotguns are regulated under the National Firearms Act of 1934 and subsequent amendments. To own one of those weapons, a civilian has to go through a lengthy approval process and pay a special tax. The job of deciding whether a gun falls under NFA's restrictions falls to ATF.

Gun manufacturers have used the law's technicalities to create guns that are just as powerful, and deadly, as restricted weapons but without the added tax and strict regulations.

Take the SAINT, by Springfield Armory. It's an AR-15 with a 30-round magazine and a 7.5-inch barrel. That's shorter than the legal rifle length under federal law. But instead of a shoulder stock, the SAINT has a "stabilizing brace" or "forearm brace"--a device designed to attach to a shooter's forearm for one-handed firing rather than resting against their shoulder. By ATF's definition, the SAINT is a pistol, not a rifle, because it isn't meant to be fired from the shoulder. So anyone who can pass a federal background check can buy one online for $989.

[...] Stabilizing braces aren't the only new gun tech to skirt around the National Firearms Act. Franklin Armory's Binary Trigger System fires two rounds with every shot--one when the trigger is depressed and one when it's released, doubling the rate of fire. Like bump stocks and stabilizing braces, binary triggers aren't currently regulated under the National Firearms Act.

In one YouTube video, a man uses a binary trigger to fire a 30-round magazine in less than five seconds. In another, a binary trigger beats out a fully-automatic weapon.

[1] Bogus link in TFA. Fixed in TFS.
[2] Content is behind scripts.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Sunday June 24 2018, @07:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the Layers:-A-bunch-of-hens dept.

Micron Non-Volatile Update (Q2'18): 96L 3D NAND in H2, 4th Gen 3D NAND Enroute, Sales of 3D XPoint Disappoint

At present Micron is ramping up production of its 64-layer 3D TLC NAND memory (2nd Gen 3D NAND) and last quarter it achieved production output crossover with other types of NAND the company manufactures. This is particularly good news for Micron because 64-layer 3D NAND devices are significantly more cost-efficient in terms of cost per bit compared to 32-layer 3D NAND memory, which allows Micron to earn more. In fact, 64-layer 3D NAND enabled Micron to launch two major products. First, the company released its 2.5-inch SATA 5200 ECO SSDs with up to 7.68 TB capacity in January targeting mainstream servers. Second, 64-layer 3D QLC memory enabled Micron to compete for nearline storage segment with its 5210 ION drives launched back in May.

Earlier this month we reported that at least two developers of SSD controllers have qualified Micron's 96-layer 3D TLC NAND memory for SSDs. During the conference call, Micron confirmed that it was on track to ship its 3rd Gen 3D NAND in volumes for commercial products in the second half of calendar 2018. It is not clear whether the initial batches of such memory will be used for various removable storage solutions (memory cards, USB flash drives, etc.) as it happens usually, but it is evident that Micron's 96-layer 3D NAND is making a good progress with designers of SSD controllers. Maxio Technology intends to use Micron's 3D TLC B27A memory for inexpensive drives based on its MAS0902A-B2C DRAM-less controller, whereas Silicon Motion is so confident of this memory that it has qualified it with its top-of-the-range SM2262EN controller for high-performance SSDs.

[...] While sales of Micron's SSDs are growing (and currently account for 50% of Micron's storage business revenue, or $507 million) and the company continues to shift to high-value specialized NAND products from selling raw NAND chips, shipments of 3D XPoint are below expectations. According to Micron, it sold "very little" 3D XPoint memory to its unnamed parter (almost certainly Intel) during its Q3 FY2018.

Micron's 4th-generation 3D NAND could have up to 128 layers.

Related: "String-Stacking" Being Developed to Enable 3D NAND With More Than 100 Layers
64-Layer 3D NAND at Computex
SK Hynix Developing 96 and 128-Layer TLC 3D NAND
Intel and Micron Boost 3D XPoint Production
Micron Launches First QLC NAND SSD


Original Submission

posted by mrpg on Sunday June 24 2018, @05:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the dont-mine-in-azure dept.

[...] Microsoft has now revealed that source of its troubles: mildly warm weather. That day in Dublin, where Microsoft's North Europe data center resides, the high temperature reached a pleasant 18°C or about 64°F in Freedom Units.

[...] Microsoft's Azure status history explains, "On 19 Jun 2018, Data Center Critical Environments systems in one of our data centers in the North Europe region experienced an increase in outside air temperature."

[...] Azure customers who rely on the North Europe region may want to make sure they have outage plans in place. By next Friday, the weather forecast in Dublin anticipates temperatures as high as 24°C or 75°F.

According to a 2016 study by Emerson Network Power and the Ponemon Institute, about 12 per cent of data center outages can be attributed to weather, with the remainder being human and mechanical error.

It was an 11 hours disruption.


Original Submission

posted by mrpg on Sunday June 24 2018, @02:56AM   Printer-friendly
from the no-carrier dept.

As solutions go, it is certainly radical: in order to thwart a mass epidemic of cheating by students taking their school leaving exams, Algeria shut down the internet for up to three hours a day this week – for everyone.

[... The public telephone operator Algérie Telecom] published a timetable of the shutdown schedule: three one-hour blackouts, coinciding with the first hour of each baccalaureate exam, on Wednesday, and two each on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

[...] Cheating among the more than 700,000 students who take Algeria's bac was so widespread in 2016 that the education ministry declared several exams void and using new question papers.

[...] Algeria is not, however, the only country to take such radical steps during exam season: Syria, Iraq, Mauritania, Uzbekistan and several Indian states reportedly block access to the internet. Ethiopia shuts down social media.

Algeria blocks internet to prevent students cheating during exams


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Sunday June 24 2018, @12:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the at-least-I-am-safe-with-my-abacus dept.

Meet TLBleed: A crypto-key-leaking CPU attack that Intel reckons we shouldn't worry about

Intel has, for now, no plans to specifically address a side-channel vulnerability in its processors that can be potentially exploited by malware to extract encryption keys and other sensitive info from applications.

A team of researchers at the Systems and Network Security Group at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, say they were able to leverage the security weakness to extract crypto keys from another running program in 99.8 [percent] of tests on an Intel Skylake Core i7-6700K desktop CPU; 98.2 percent of tests on an Intel Broadwell Xeon E5-2620 v4 server CPU; and 99.8 per cent of tests on a Coffeelake part.

Their code was able to lift a secret 256-bit key, used to cryptographically sign data, from another program while it performed a signing operation with libgcrypt's Curve 25519 EdDSA implementation. It took roughly 17 seconds to determine each of the keys using machine-learning software and some brute force, according to a paper detailing the attack, seen by The Register this week.

[...] The extraction technique is not reliant on speculative execution, and thus is unrelated to Spectre and Meltdown. Instead, it builds upon the exploitation of Intel's Hyper-Threading technology and the processor caches to leak data, which is a known security problem with its own mitigations.

[...] [Ben] Gras also believes AMD's hardware threading technology in its latest Zen processors – Ryzen, Threadripper, and Epyc – are at risk from TLBleed, as the CPU cores can also each run multiple threads simultaneously just like Intel parts. A spokesperson for AMD had no comment.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Saturday June 23 2018, @10:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the You-can-Kickstarter,-too dept.

This isn't so much a shameless plug for an irreverent fluff piece of 2015 marketing done successfully as it is a platform to discuss topics related to internet marketing, price points, successful fundraisers and the long tail of failed attempts and outright scams found on crowdfunding sites like Indiegogo and Kickstarter.

"Exploding Kittens," a party card game co-created by internet cartoonist Matthew Inman, better known as "The Oatmeal," raised $8,782,571 in early 2015. At the time, it was the fastest-funded Kickstarter of all time. The game has since released for smartphones, and the team has released more games, like "You've Got Crabs."

I find it interesting that this recent retrospective look at successful Kickstarter campaigns is heavy on the games and even movies, closely matching the number of physical products like the Pebble smartwatch and the Coolest Cooler.

Gotta give a shout out to:

"LeVar Burton Kids Skybrary" after Burton, the show's host, lost the rights to the "Reading Rainbow" brand.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Saturday June 23 2018, @08:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the DesktopWallpaper++ dept.

ESA releases complete Rosetta archive, including a final surprise

The European Space Agency has released a complete archive of imagery and data from the historic Rosetta mission, allowing armchair astronauts to relive the spacecraft's thrilling final descent to the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and the challenging search for the wayward Philae lander. It even includes a reconstructed final frame that wasn't initially recognized as an image.

The final set of high-resolution images from the OSIRIS camera covers the period between July 2016 and end of mission on 30 September that years, pushing the total number of wide- and narrow-angle images to nearly 100,000 over the mission's 12-year voyage.

[...] "Having all the images finally archived to be shared with the world is a wonderful feeling," Holger Sierks, OSIRIS principal investigator. "We are also pleased to announce that all OSIRIS images are now available under a Creative Commons license."

As an added bonus, Sierks' team discovered three packets of data that were part of a partial image, the last one Rosetta attempted to capture before setting down on the comet's surface and ending science operations. The packets represented about half of a complete image but engineers were able to reconstruct a slightly blurred view showing a metre-wide view of the surface.

There is a link in the story to a 2m54s YouTube video of OSIRIS images taken during Rosetta's final hours.


Original Submission

posted by mrpg on Saturday June 23 2018, @05:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the systemd dept.

If you've been trying to keep Microsoft's forced updates and upgrades off your machine, your job just got harder. With KB 4056254, we now have a new Win10 Update Facilitation Service joining its comrade-in-arms Update Assistant V2 to ensure no patch gets blocked.

You can look at the new KB 4056254 Win10 Update Facilitation Service and the re-emergence of Win10 Update Assistant V2 from two different perspectives. On the one hand, you have those poor hapless Win10 users who accidentally munged Windows Update. On the other hand, you have folks with bazookas and flamethrowers who want to keep some semblance of control over updating their machines.

Both groups now face two different Microsoft initiatives to reset Windows Update.

[...] Seems, from April to June 2018, some savvy Win 10 users have found new ways to disable or block Windows Update. So, M$ has to come out with KB4056254 to "neutralize" their efforts. It's like a cat-and-mouse game.

Which seems to me like the core of the matter. It's not nice to mess with Mother Microsoft's patching schemes, so you're going to get a few new services running in the background to whop your system upside the head if you dare to block patches.

Sources:
Win10 Update Facilitation Service joins Update Assistant V2 to make sure you get patched | Computerworld
Watch out: Win10 Update Facilitation as a Service and a new push for the Update Assistant | AskWoody


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Saturday June 23 2018, @03:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the unfortunate dept.

According to this article on MSN:

Police in Tempe, Arizona said evidence showed the "safety" driver behind the wheel of a self-driving Uber was distracted and streaming a television show on her phone right up until about the time of a fatal accident in March, deeming the crash that rocked the nascent industry "entirely avoidable."

A 318-page report from the Tempe Police Department, released late on Thursday in response to a public records request, said the driver, Rafaela Vasquez, repeatedly looked down and not at the road, glancing up just a half second before the car hit 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, who was crossing the street at night.

According to the report, Vasquez could face charges of vehicle manslaughter. Police said that, based on testing, the crash was "deemed entirely avoidable" if Vasquez had been paying attention.

Police obtained records from Hulu, an online service for streaming television shows and movies, which showed Vasquez's account was playing the television talent show "The Voice" the night of the crash for about 42 minutes, ending at 9:59 p.m., which "coincides with the approximate time of the collision," the report says.

It is not clear if Vasquez will be charged, and police submitted their findings to county prosecutors, who will make the determination.


Original Submission