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takyon writes:

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has posted another quarter of disappointing financial results:

The Computing and Graphics segment continues to struggle, although AMD did see stronger sequential growth here with the recent launch of Carrizo. Revenue increased 12% over last quarter, although it is still down 46% year-over-year. This segment had an operating loss of $181 million for the quarter, up from a loss of $147 million last quarter and a loss of $17 million a year ago. Sequentially, the loss is mostly attributed to a write-down of $65 million which AMD is taking on older-generation products. Annually, the decrease is due to lower overall sales. Unlike Intel, AMD processors had a decrease in Average Selling Price (ASP) both sequentially and year-over-year, so there was no help there from the lower sales volume. The GPU ASP was a different story, staying flat sequentially and increasing year-over-year. Recent launches of new AMD graphics cards have helped here.

Alongside the Q3 2015 earnings release, AMD has announced that it is selling an 85% stake in its back-end manufacturing operations. ATMP, "for assembly, test, mark, and pack," is the step in semiconductor manufacturing that takes a finished wafer of chips and cuts them up into individual chips for customer use. AMD retained these operations even after the spin-off of chip fabrication in the form of GlobalFoundries in 2009. Nantong Fujitsu Microelectronics (NFME) will pay AMD $371 million ($320 million after taxes and expenses), and operate a joint venture to produce chips:

[More after the break.]

fliptop writes:

In December 2014, CEO Scott Flanders hinted that nudity could vanish completely from the Playboy brand.

In a bid to make itself more relevant, Playboy magazine has officially announced they're no longer running photos of fully nude women:

Playboy officials have declared that they've won a culture war, so they're moving on. "You're now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it's just passé at this juncture," said Scott Flanders, Playboy's CEO, in an interview with the [New York] Times. He also said: "That battle has been fought and won."

[Ed. note: I was unsure as to whether this story was germane to our site. But then I stepped back to look at the bigger picture. At one time, Playboy pretty much *owned* its category, though with time other publications later rose up to challenge it. Times have changed. Just how relevant are print publications these days? What other storied publications have disappeared? Which are next? What will the publishing landscape look like in ten or twenty years?]

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AnonTechie writes:

The surface of Pluto is marked by plains, troughs and peaks that appear to have been carved out by geological processes that have been active for a very long period and continue to the present, a new study says. The study represents the first published results from the flyby of the Pluto-Charon system earlier this year. NASA's New Horizons mission continues to download information gathered from Pluto and its moon Charon during its historic flyby on 14 July, 2015. As this data arrives on Earth, scientists process and study it. Here, Alan Stern and colleagues overview some of the first results from this effort. Data on the variability of craters on Pluto suggests the dwarf planet has been frequently resurfaced by processes like erosion or crustal recycling, though the energy source to power these resurfacing activities is unclear, Stern and colleagues say.

But the results do point to active geomorphic processes within the last few hundred million years, probably continuing to the present. Data from New Horizons also reveal that Pluto's surface is home to large regions of differing brightness and areas carved out by structures similar to terrestrial glaciers. Charon's surface is similarly complex, with rolling plains, moat-like depressions, and evidence for tectonics. Atmospheric pressure is lower than expected in Pluto's atmosphere, New Horizons' instruments show, though it is unclear whether this reflects a recent decrease in the mass of the atmosphere. Charon has no detectable atmosphere, the data reveal. Pluto's small moons, Nix and Hydra, both have reflective surfaces, suggesting relatively clean water ice. Taken together, these initial results from the flyby of Pluto pave the way for scientists' better understanding of processes of planetary evolution.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-10/aaft-fsr101315.php

Three months after flyby, New Horizons team publishes first research paper

[Also Covered By]: The Washington Post

Note: This paper will be available for free when the embargo lifts at ScienceMag

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Hyperturtle writes:

Windows has brought personalized advertising into the Desktop OS realm.

For those of us with ad blockers installed in our browsers, it may prove to not be enough to shield us from the advertising that Microsoft is now including as part of Windows Update.

The new suggested apps are shown right on the task bar. Is this going to be an accepted new "normal" for Windows users? How will they use their mandatory telemetry to measure feedback and improve the messaging?

And if this isn't accepted but continues to be forced as normal, how can one expect to actually opt-out of this sort of behavior if automatic updates are not allowed to be controlled by typical users on non-enterprise installs of the OS? Being able to opt-out out of *seeing* such recommendations is not the same as preventing the OS from tracking behaviors used to guide the selection of such displayed advertisements.

Prior to Windows 10, this kind of behavior never happened in Windows without it being from malware of some kind.

http://betanews.com/2015/10/15/microsoft-now-uses-windows-10s-start-menu-to-display-ads/

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Phoenix666 writes:

The more that bike lanes multiply in cities, from New York to São Paulo, the more people ride. Over the past decade, bike commuting in the U.S. has grown 62%. But it's still a tiny fraction of overall transportation.

In order to really get people out of cars, a group of Australian designers thinks we need to fully redesign cities—including the way we make buildings.

"The city of the future should not have infrastructure for cycling," writes Steven Fleming, an urban design professor and director of Cycle Space, an organization that reimagines bike-based urban design. "It should be infrastructure for cycling."
...
He calls it the "start of trip" problem—even if a city has great bike lanes, if someone doesn't have a good way to store and access their bike, they may not want to ride. Bike-friendly cities like Copenhagen still struggle with what happens when you get home or arrive at a destination.

Amsterdam and Copenhagen seem to be on the leading edge of bikeable cities. Any Soylentils familiar with those places care to opine?

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HughPickens.com writes:

The NYT reports that Julian Assange has suffered "deep pain" in his right shoulder for the last three months but the British government has refused to let the WikiLeaks founder Assange receive a special "safe-passage" so he can receive medical attention outside the country's London embassy where he has been holed up for over three years. "The British government is not offering the terms to make this happen," Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño told journalists. "It's an additional fault in his protection, in the defence of a person's human rights. This is a person who needs to have exams done to understand the situation given it is grave. We don't know what he may have, and they don't want to give an authorization that they can perfectly well give." According to Patiño, Assange needs magnetic resonance imaging scan to investigate the source of the pain. "The reply we have had from Britain is that he can leave whenever he likes for any medical care he might need but the European arrest warrant for Assange is still valid. In other words, he can leave – and we will put him in jail," Patiño added.

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Phoenix666 writes:

An international team of scientists including from the University of Adelaide have identified potential inhibitors of specific cell membrane proteins, which are involved in the spread of cancer to other parts of the body (metastasis) and in the progression of autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis.

The newly identified molecules strongly inhibit the action of the two 'chemokine receptors' CXCR4 and ACKR3 which work together to regulate cell migration, important in both cancer metastasis and autoimmune disease.

The findings of the research team from University of California, San Diego, and the Chemokine Biology Laboratory in the University of Adelaide's Centre for Molecular Pathology, published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, are an important step towards the development of new therapeutic treatments for these diseases.

One of the new molecules, the variant which bound most strongly to the CXCR4 receptor, inhibited multiple sclerosis in a laboratory study.

"Scientists around the world are looking for ways of blocking the CXCR4 and ACKR3 receptors as a means of preventing or at least slowing down the cell migration that underlies the progression of these diseases," says Professor Shaun McColl, Director of the Centre for Molecular Pathology at the University of Adelaide.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Point a telescope at the moon, and you might just see one looking back. Chinese researchers have reported that their robotic telescope, the first of its kind, has been operating flawlessly ever since it landed on the moon in 2013.

The 15-centimetre telescope is mounted on the Chang'e 3 lander, which touched down on the lunar surface in December 2013. Chang'e 3 carried the Yutu rover, which repeatedly struggled to survive the lunar night and ceased working in March this year – but the lander is still going strong.

The telescope sees in ultraviolet light, making it particularly suited for observations that aren't possible here on Earth. "There is no atmosphere on the moon, so unlike Earth, the ultraviolet light from celestial objects can be detected on the moon," says Jing Wang of the National Astronomical Observatories in Beijing, China, who is in charge of the telescope. And since the moon rotates 27 times more slowly than the Earth, the scope can stay fixed on the same star for a dozen days without interruption, he says.

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Appalbarry writes:

It was reported today that Bell Canada, one of the three companies that make up our [Canadian] telecommunications oligopoly, has been fined $1.25 million for encouraging its employees "to plant glowing reviews of Bell apps for mobile devices."

The (Canadian) Competition Bureau said certain Bell employees in November 2014 posted positive reviews and ratings of the new version of the free MyBell Mobile app and Virgin My Account app on the iTunes App Store and the Google Play Store, without disclosing that they work for Bell.

Bell acknowledged at the time that "overzealous" employees talked up the product, but said the conduct is not consistent with company policy.

As part of a consent agreement with the Competition Bureau, Montreal-based Bell has agreed to refrain from directing or incentivizing its staff or contractors to rate, rank or review apps in app stores.

According to CBC News, the fraudulent reviews were reported by Scott Stratten, president of UnMarketing, a company that writes about unethical marketing tactics.

Stratten noticed something was amiss when reading reviews for the latest version of the MyBell Mobile app after it launched last November. He thought some of the language used was suspicious. For example, S Saade wrote: "Excellent new app. Looking forward to updates with residential services."

"Just words that you do not say in real life," Stratten said at the time.

He began cross-checking reviewers' user names with LinkedIn profiles where people list their work status. He discovered many of the positive reviewers were actually Bell employees.

I for one am reassured by this story, and am glad that fraudulent app ratings are an incredibly rare thing.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Toyota, under ambitious environmental targets, is aiming to sell hardly any regular gasoline vehicles by 2050, only hybrids and fuel cells, to radically reduce emissions.

The automaker promised to involve governments, affiliated companies and other "stakeholders" in its push to reduce average emissions from Toyota cars by 90 percent by about 2050, compared with 2010 levels.

Electric cars weren't part of their vision, outlined by top Toyota Motor Corp. officials at a Tokyo museum on Wednesday, striking a contrast with rivals such as Nissan Motor Co., which has banked on that zero-emissions technology.

Toyota's commitments come at a time when the auto industry has been shaken by a scandal at Germany's Volkswagen AG, in which it admitted it cheated on diesel emissions tests covering millions of cars.

Toyota projected its annual sales of fuel cell vehicles will reach more than 30,000 by about 2020, which is 10 times its projected figure for 2017.

No gas cars 30 years from now. Hardly feels ambitious anymore at the dawn of the age of the EV.

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About 6 months ago, there was much discussion here and elsewhere regarding the introduction of systemd in many of the leading linux distros. Some of us chose to move to alternative software, but for many others the change came and went largely unnoticed. Now, an Anonymous Coward writes:

Structural and semantic deficiencies in the systemd architecture for real-world service management

This is a in-depth architectural critique of systemd. It claims to be the first purely technical review of systemd internals, and provides a detailed analysis of several components. It criticizes on the basis of ordering related failures, a difficult to predict execution model, non-determinism in boot-order, as well as several other points.

Though many users would perceive the long processing pipeline to increase reliability and be more "correct" than the simpler case, there is little to acknowledge this. For one thing, none of jobs, transactions, unit semantics or systemd-style dependencies map to the Unix process model, but rather are necessary complications to address issues in systemd being structured as an encapsulating object system for resources and processes (as opposed to a more well-defined process supervisor) and one accommodating for massive parallelism. Reliability gains would be difficult to measure, and that more primal toolkits like those of the daemontools family have been used in large-scale deployments for years would serve as a counterexample needing overview.

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HughPickens.com writes:

The NYT reported on October 14, 2015 that a magnitude 4.5 quake struck Saturday afternoon about three miles northwest of the Cushing Hub, a sprawling tank farm that is among the largest oil storage facilities in the world, now holding 53 million barrels of crude with a capacity for 85 million barrels. The Cushing oil hub stores oil piped from across North America until it is dispatched to refineries. The Department of Homeland Security has gauged potential earthquake dangers to the hub and concluded that a quake equivalent to the record magnitude 5.7 could significantly damage the tanks and a study by Dr. Daniel McNamara study concludes that recent earthquakes have increased stresses along two stretches of fault that could lead to quakes of that size. "It's the eye of the storm," says Dana Murphy, vice chairman of the state's oil and gas regulatory body, the Oklahoma Corporation Commission.

"When we see these fault systems producing multiple magnitude 4s, we start to get concerned that it could knock into higher magnitudes," says Daniel McNamara, author of a paper published online that a large earthquake near the storage hub "could seriously damage storage tanks and pipelines." "Given the number of magnitude 4s here, it's a high concern." Nevertheless, Oklahoma's attempt to deal with the earthquakes this autumn faces continuing obstacles. The government's chief seismologist, who came under oil industry pressure to minimize the quakes' origins in waste disposal, left this fall, and his successor is scheduled to depart soon. The state budget for the fiscal year that began in July slashed appropriations to the Corporation Commission by nearly 45 percent.

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"gewg_" writes:

MyNewsLA reports

The Los Angeles City Council voted [October 14] to allow backyard beekeeping, joining cities like Santa Monica, New York, Denver, and other cities where the hobby is legal.

[...] Councilman Paul Koretz [....] said bees "do especially well in Los Angeles" and Wednesday's move could help address bee colony collapse disorder which has claimed about a third of the global bee population.

[...] City leaders and members of HoneyLove, a nonprofit that promotes beekeeping, said the activity aids urban farming efforts such as community gardens. They also said urban areas offer a pesticide-free environment for insects that are critical to the health of agriculture and plants.

[...] The ordinance allows no more than one hive per 2,500 square feet per lot area to be kept in the backyards of single-family homes citywide. Front yard beekeeping is barred by the ordinance.

It also sets buffer zones and areas on a property where hives can be kept and requires that beekeepers raise walls or hedges high enough to ensure bees need to fly up before leaving the backyard.

A water source also needs to be maintained near the hives so the bees would not need to venture outside of the beekeeper's backyard to get hydrated, under the rules.

The backyard beekeepers also need to register with the County of Los Angeles Agricultural Commission.

The commission has 129 beekeepers registered with 219 locations countywide, according to commission spokesman Ken Pellman. Of those registered, 39 are commercial beekeepers, which means they have eight or more hives.

[...] Los Angeles already averages about eight to 10 feral bee hives per square mile.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

An iconic figure of the early history of computing, Grace Hopper is the grandmother of the COBOL programming language. Of her many claims to fame, she invented the first compiler and helped spread the adoption of machine-independent programming languages. Today her legacy lives on in many ways, including the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

While Hopper contributions to computing are remembered, celebrated, and built upon by her successors, COBOL itself is often dismissed as a relic of earlier era of computing. To a certain extent, that is true. Most of the COBOL being written today is for maintaining legacy code, not starting new projects. However, the language is still being updated with COBOL 2014 being the most recent standard for the language, and there are still plenty of opportunities to apply for jobs that require COBOL experience.

Thankfully, using COBOL in modern times does not require tracking down legacy hardware. There are several tools available that make using COBOL on modern computers as straightforward as using other programming languages. Below, I take a look at three open source projects that help you code, compile, and use COBOL on a Mac, Linux, or Windows computer. So grab a book on COBOL programming, (if you need one, Beginning COBOL for Programmers by Michael Coughlan is an excellent choice), and start exploring the world of COBOL. No punch cards required.

Is COBOL the last, best hope for an aging programmer in today's world?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

We're almost at the end of the first month of the Volkswagen scandal, which now includes 11 million cars and Leonardo DiCaprio. VW's US boss has testified to Congress, blaming a few rogue software engineers. All the while, questions have raged about VW Group's future: which projects are safe, which ones are on the chopping block, and how exactly will the company recover from this?
...
VW's board has finally started to answer some of those swirling questions. For starters, there's going to be much more emphasis on electrification. Electric vehicles and hybrids have played more of a bit part at VW, compared to Toyota, GM, and domestic rivals BMW and Mercedes-Benz. That's going to change with a standard electric architecture that can be used across multiple vehicles and brands.

VW Group isn't devoid of hybrid and EV know-how. Audi's Le Mans program has taught it a lot about high voltage automotive systems, and Porsche has a wealth of experience from the 918 Spyder, Panamera Hybrid, and even the 919 Hybrid racer. VW would be smart to leverage all these programs.

VW is the largest car company in Europe. This is what sudden, disruptive technological change looks like.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A cybercriminal network that caused at least $10 million in losses has been disrupted by U.S. and U.K. law enforcement, with the U.S. seeking a Moldovan man's extradition from Cyprus, the Department of Justice said Tuesday.

Andrey Ghinkul, 30, is accused of being the administrator of the Dridex botnet, also known as Cridex and Bugat.

A nine-count indictment was unsealed on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, DOJ said. Ghinkul was arrested on Aug. 28 in Cyprus.

Dridex has been a real headache for a number of years. It collects online banking credentials from infected computers, which prosecutors said were then used to initiate large wire transfers.

Original Submission