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AndyTheAbsurd writes:

Andy Hunt - one of the originators of the Agile Manifesto, and NOT your humble submitter - has concluded that Agile has lost its way:

The basis of an agile approach is to embrace change; to be aware of changes to the product under development, the needs and wishes of the users, the environment, the competition, the market, the technology; all of these can be volatile fountains of change. To embrace the flood of changes, agile methods advise us to “inspect and adapt.” That is, to figure out what‘s changed and adapt to it by changing our methods, refactoring our code, collaborating with our customers, and so on. But most agile adopters simply can‘t do that, for a very good reason. When you are first learning a new skill—a new programming language, or a new technique, or a new development method—you do not yet have the experience, mental models, or ability to handle an abstract concept such as “inspect and adapt.” Those abilities are only present in practitioners with much more experience, at higher skill levels

Andy also has some thoughts on how to correct this - starting with the idea that Agile methodologies must be applied to Agile methodologies, to allow them to adapt to changing needs.

Teckla writes in with an article promoting "Death to C":

Ladies and gentlemen, the C programming language. It’s a classic. It is blindingly, quicksilver fast, because it’s about as close to the bone of the machine as you can get. It is time-tested and ubiquitous. And it is terrifyingly dangerous.

The author's biggest issue with the C language seems to be security holes:

If you write code in C, you have to be careful not to introduce subtle bugs that can turn into massive security holes — and as anyone who ever wrote software knows, you cannot be perfectly careful all of the time.

The author claims that the Rust language is a modern answer to these issues and should replace C (and C++). It does look that Rust can run C code, so it looks like an interesting proposition. What do Soylent's coders think about this?

sigma writes:

makezine.com has an article on a new $9 SBC.

An Oakland, CA based team of artists and engineers have built $9 Single Board Computer (SBC) called Chip. Chip runs Debian Linux as its operating system and includes a 1Ghz quad core R8 ARM processor, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of storage as well as 8 GPIO ports, onboard wifi, bluetooth, battery controller and other goodies.

While the Chip is capable enough to manage office and other general purpose computing, it's mainly intended as a project board. The team has some optional extras, including Pocket Chip, a portable, handheld enclosure with an LCD screen, full QWERTY keyboard, and internal battery. With this combination, the Pocket Chip is a fully functioning $50 computer.

If you’re wondering how Chip could be this inexpensive, you can thank cheap Chinese tablets. The System-on-Chip used in the development board is based on an A13 processor by Allwinner, a Shenzhen-based semiconductor company. As recently as 2013, Allwinner was the second largest tablet manufacturer in the world, and the A13 was the most successful processor in Allwinner’s lineup.

Could this be a Raspberry Pi killer?

AnonTechie writes:

We've previously covered how standby mode in game consoles suck. Well, it seems like many devices across the US are sucking a whole lot of power--$19 Billion/yr worth. That is just the US estimation, it is not extrapolated out across the globe.

Approximately $19 billion worth of electricity, equal to the output of 50 large power plants, is devoured annually by U.S. household electronics, appliances, and other equipment when consumers are not actively using them, according to a ground breaking study released today by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The report, "Home Idle Load: Devices Wasting Huge Amounts of Electricity When Not in Active Use," found most of the devices either plugged in or hard-wired into America's homes consume electricity around-the-clock, even when the owners are not using them or think they are turned off. The annual cost for this vampire energy drain, which provides little benefit to consumers, ranges from $165 per U.S. household on average to as high as $440 under some utilities' top-tier rates.

"One reason for such high idle energy levels is that many previously purely mechanical devices have gone digital: Appliances like washers, dryers, and fridges now have displays, electronic controls, and increasingly even Internet connectivity, for example," says Pierre Delforge, the report's author and NRDC's director of high-tech sector energy efficiency. "In many cases, they are using far more electricity than necessary."

sigma writes:

Engadget reports that ZTE's premium brand, Nubia has announced their Z9 phone with what they call "Frame interactive Technology" or "FiT", which enables grip and gesture-based control on the aluminum frame.

Gestures included in the standard build include squeezing the phone twice to switch to single-hand mode so the screen automatically moves to your thumb's side, opening the camera by holding the phone horizontally with four finger (thumb) tips, and changing screen brightness by swiping up or down along both sides. Note that there's no mention of any additional action if this motion is performed repeatedly.

The FiT technology is open to customization and 3rd party apps, so extensions are very likely to be on the horizon.

AnonTechie writes:

THIS WEEK MARKS the two-year anniversary since Cody Wilson, the inventor of the world’s first 3-D printable gun, received a letter from the State Department demanding that he remove the blueprints for his plastic-printed firearm from the internet. The alternative: face possible prosecution for violating regulations that forbid the international export of unapproved arms.

Now Wilson is challenging that letter. And in doing so, he’s picking a fight that could pit proponents of gun control and defenders of free speech against each other in an age when the line between a lethal weapon and a collection of bits is blurrier than ever before.

Wilson’s gun manufacturing advocacy group Defense Distributed, along with the gun rights group the Second Amendment Foundation, on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against the State Department and several of its officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry. In their complaint, they claim that a State Department agency called the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC) violated their first amendment right to free speech by telling Defense Distributed that it couldn’t publish a 3-D printable file for its one-shot plastic pistol known as the Liberator, along with a collection of other printable gun parts, on its website.

In its 2013 letter to Defense Distributed, the DDTC cited a long-controversial set of regulations known as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which controls whether and how Americans can sell weapons beyond U.S. borders. By merely posting a 3-D-printable file to a website, in other words, the DDTC claimed Defense Distributed had potentially violated arms export controls—just as if it had shipped a crate of AR-15s to, say, Mexico. But the group’s lawsuit now argues that whether or not the Liberator is a weapon, its blueprints are “speech,” and that Americans’ freedom of speech is protected online—even when that speech can be used to make a gun with just a few clicks.

http://www.wired.com/2015/05/3-d-printed-gun-lawsuit-starts-war-arms-control-free-speech/

Here’s the full complaint from Defense Distributed: https://www.scribd.com/doc/264435890/Defense-Distributed-et-al-v-U-S-Dept-of-State

Hugh Pickens writes:

Sara Novak reports that according to a recent study, “badly tuned” cars and trucks make up one quarter of the vehicles on the road, but cause 95 percent of black carbon, also known as soot, 93 percent of carbon monoxide, and 76 percent of volatile organic chemicals like benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylenes. “The most surprising thing we found was how broad the range of emissions was,” says Greg Evans. “As we looked at the exhaust coming out of individual vehicles, we saw so many variations. How you drive, hard acceleration, age of the vehicle, how the car is maintained – these are things we can influence that can all have an effect on pollution.”

Researchers at the University of Toronto looked at 100,000 cars as they drove past air sampling probes on one of Toronto’s major roads. An automated identification and integration method was applied to high time resolution air pollutant measurements of in-use vehicle emissions performed under real-world conditions at a near-road monitoring station in Toronto, Canada during four seasons, through month-long campaigns in 2013–2014. Based on carbon dioxide measurements, over 100 000 vehicle-related plumes were automatically identified and fuel-based emission factors for nitrogen oxides; carbon monoxide; particle number, black carbon; benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylenes (BTEX); and methanol were determined for each plume.

Evans and his team found that policy changes need to better target cars that are causing the majority of the air pollution. “The ultrafine particles are particularly troubling,” says Evans. “Because they are over 1,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, they have a greater ability to penetrate deeper within the lung and travel in the body.”

sigma writes:

The UK's V3 news site reports that the Vatican library considers open source file formats to be the only reliable way for humanity to preserve its history in the digital age.

Vatican Library CIO Luciano Ammenti said that, in order for the manuscripts to be readable, the Vatican Library opted for open source tools that do not require proprietary platforms, such as Microsoft Office, to be read.

What formats have you found best for archiving? Which have given you problems?

takyon writes:

Oculus has announced that it will be shipping a consumer version of Oculus Rift in Q1 2016, and taking pre-orders later this year. It has also released images of the final design.

Ars Technica has attempted to quantify the market for Oculus. Facebook's vision for Oculus appears rosy:

No specific price has been announced for the first consumer version of the Rift, but Oculus executives have said they expect the final headset to fall in the $200 to $400 range, roughly in line with the $300 to $350 price charged for existing development kits. HTC, on the other hand, has warned consumers to "expect a higher price point" for the first edition of the Vive.

Last June, Iribe told Ars they expect to sell "north of a million units" for the first consumer Rift headset. Oculus doesn't expect a wider "console-style" market of "many millions" of Rift users to become a reality until the second version of the headset comes one or two years after the first, Iribe said at the time. Facebook founder (and Oculus owner) and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is certainly looking forward to that wider market, saying last October that he envisioned sales of "50 to 100 million" Rift units within a decade.

[More after the break...]

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The resumes of over 27,000 people working in the US intelligence community were revealed in a searchable database created by mining LinkedIn.

Transparency Toolkit said the database, called ICWatch, includes the public resumes of people working for intelligence contractors, the military and intelligence agencies.

The group said the resumes frequently mention secret codewords and surveillance programs.

"These resumes include many details about the names and functions of secret surveillance programs, including previously unknown secret codewords," Transparency Toolkit said.

To create the database, Transparency Toolkit built search software, called LookingGlass, to make it easy to browse the data. Both Looking Glass and the ICWatch data have been released on Github.

I first saw this story on Slashdot, where it is no longer available. [Here it is on Slashdot]. As of this writing, the code used to do the analysis, along with the resulting data, was still available on GitHub.

[Editor's note] These can also be found by following the links on Transparency Toolkit's Tools page.

takyon writes:

The semi-autonomous Freightliner Inspiration Truck from Daimler Trucks North America has received approval from the state of Nevada to operate on its roads:

Highway Pilot utilises stereoscopic cameras located at the front end of the truck which will scan for traffic signs, lane markers, and, of course, other vehicles. This scan results in 3D imagery being fed into the Inspiration Truck's "electronic brain" (computer, surely?) which then adjusts the electric steering rack, the drive-by-wire throttle, and the automated manual transmission to keep the truck between the lines and at a safe distance behind any leading vehicles.

"Ninety-percent of commercial truck accidents are due to driver error and 1 in 8 of those are due to driver fatigue," stated Freightliner's Head of Trucks and Buses, Wolfgang Bernhard, at an unveiling event at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Bernhard added that AV technology can help curb long-haul fatigue by allowing a computer to handle the longer and duller highway stretches.

Freightliner is refreshingly frank about the automated elements of its Highway Pilot system, and admits they are little more than standard cruise control and lane departure prevention systems which have been somewhat tidied and organised for lorry use. It is understood that there is no intention to weaponise the AVs or develop the capacity to autonomously transform between vehicle types.

Based on existent technologies from its sister company Mercedes-Benz, Freightliner's Inspiration Truck does, however, do away with the requirement for AV-specific infrastructure. Abandoned are the cries for special beacons, or special AV driving lanes. The camera-based technology apparently needs only clear traffic signs and crisp white stripes to function effectively, which is more than one might say for many human drivers.

takyon writes:

The Russian spacecraft Progress M-27M, which attempted to deliver cargo to the International Space Station (ISS), faces fiery death on Friday:

A Russian spacecraft that has been out of control since launching last week will fall back to Earth and burn up on Friday, scientists say. The unmanned cargo ship was launched from Kazakhstan last Tuesday, but contact was lost with it soon afterwards. The spacecraft, carrying three tonnes of equipment, will disintegrate as it enters Earth's atmosphere.

The craft was spotted by the ISS days ago. This was the 150th launch of a Progress craft.

wantkitteh writes:

GOG have opened sign-ups for the open beta of their Galaxy digital game distribution platform, currently live on Windows and Mac OS X with a Linux version expected at some unspecified point in the future. The client allows for the purchase, download and launch of a broad selection of DRM-free titles, specializing in older games with the necessary emulation or compatibility baked into the installation. While comparisons with Steam, Uplay and Origin are inevitable, the DRM-free nature of GOG's offering is likely to be a major selling point for many. Almost all the features 'expected' of a digital game distribution platform are in place; chat, auto-updates, matchmaking, achievements and time tracking. Some are still in development, like in-game overlays, but others are somewhat unexpected; auto-updates are optional and will be capable of being rolled-back in the future, interoperability between Steam and GOG allows their clients to launch games from both of a user's libraries, and the entire platform is itself optional - with no plans to withdraw the DRM download service they already provide, GOG specifically state that "the [Galaxy] Client will never be mandatory".

I'm personally intrigued by the delays to the Linux client. Given that SteamOS is Debian based, that Valve have invited other digital download platforms to participate in the project and that there appears to be close integration between Steam and GOG libraries, could a SteamOS version of GOG's Galaxy be in the making here? It certainly makes sense, expanding the audience for GOG and the catalog for SteamOS, but I guess we'll just have to wait and see. With fingers crossed.

sigma writes:

In a move that could backfire badly, car manufacturers are working together to buy control of Nokia maps with the intent of blocking Google's development of software for self-driving vehicles. The auto-makers consider open sourced autonomous vehicles to be an existential threat to their existing business, and are prepared to pay Nokia more than two billion dollars to stymie the disruptive technology.

http://jalopnik.com/bmw-audi-and-mercedes-benz-want-to-buy-nokia-s-maps-t-1702660909

"gewg_" writes:
The Center for American Progress reports

For years, studies have warned that a warmer planet might mean fewer cups of morning coffee--but a new study claims that rising temperatures are already taking their toll on East Africa's coffee crops.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, found that Tanzania's production of Arabica coffee--the most-consumed coffee species in the world--has fallen by 46 percent since 1966. Over the same period of time, the average nighttime temperature in Tanzania increased 1.4 degrees Celsius.

[...]The researchers analyzed the impact of climate variables on crop yield. Through statistical analysis, they found that increasing temperature had a negative effect on coffee yields --- but the specific interaction between temperature and coffee growth surprised them.

"We've always known that high temperatures and low rainfall impact coffee," [Alessandro Craparo, a co-author of the study] said. "What this study found, and what's really important, is its nighttime temperatures that are increasing at a rapid rate and having a bigger impact on coffee than what's happening in the day."

Arabica coffee is a sensitive plant that needs cool nights in order to thrive. For each 1-degree Celsius rise in nighttime temperatures, the researchers found, Arabica coffee yields declined by an average of 302 pounds of coffee per hectare, almost half of the typical small producer's entire yield. If trends continue as they have in previous decade, the study says, Arabica yields in Tanzania will drop to around 320 pounds per hectare by 2060.