SoylentNews

"gewg_" wrote to tell us Rupert Murdoch Takes Over at National Geographic, Immediately Starts Laying off Award-Winning Staff.

It's as bad as many of us feared. In spite of the "happy talk" of "oh, his son will be running it and he's different", "Rupert wouldn't destroy an asset like Nat Geo", etc., the axe fell on [November 3].

The memo went out, and November 3rd 2015 came to the National Geographic office. This was the day in which Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox took over National Geographic. The management of National Geographic sent out an email telling its staff—all of its staff—all to report to their headquarters, and wait by their phones. This pulled back every person who was in the field, every photographer, every reporter, even those on vacation had to show up on this fateful day.

As these phones rang, one by one National Geographic let go the award-winning staff, and the venerable institution was no more.

[...] The National Geographic Society of Washington will lay off about 180 of its 2,000-member workforce in a cost-cutting move that follows the sale of its famous magazine and other assets to a company controlled by Rupert Murdoch.

The reduction, the largest in the organization's 127-year history, appears to affect almost every department of the nonprofit organization, including the magazine, which the society has published since just after its founding in 1888. It also will affect people who work for the National Geographic Channel, the most profitable part of the organization. Several people in the channel's fact-checking department, for example, were terminated on Tuesday, employees said...

In addition to the layoffs and buyouts, National Geographic Society said it would freeze its pension plan for eligible employees, eliminate medical coverage for future retirees and change its contributions to an employee 401(k) plan so that all employees receive the same percentage contribution.

[...] Other articles hint that this may just be the beginning of the layoffs.

Original Submission

drpylons writes with news from New Zealand:

The text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement was released by TPP Parties on 5 November 2015 and can be accessed by chapter. The text will continue to undergo legal review and will be translated into French and Spanish language versions prior to signature.

All 30 Chapters and all Annexes are available for download as a single .zip file.

Note: Subsequent to this story being submitted, Ars Technica published an article Obama praises Trans-Pacific Partnership accord as full text is released which notes:

The President Barack Obama administration and other countries released the entire 2,000-page Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement on Thursday—a proposed 12-nation pact dealing with everything from intellectual property to human rights. It took five years of secret negotiations to finalize but only a moment for Obama to praise the pact publicly.

[...] The nations in the accord include the US, Japan, Australia, Peru, Malaysia, Vietnam, New Zealand, Chile, Singapore, Canada, Mexico, and Brunei. They represent about 40 percent of the global economy.

The article goes on to list some of the benefits (tariffs lowered or removed) and controversies (exports US copyright law regarding how long a copyright lasts to be life of author plus 70 years after death.)

So, now that the full text is out and available for review, what say you Soylentils? Does it provide a good balance for all parties involved? What are the upsides and downsides? Who are the winners and losers?

Original Submission

Frosty Piss writes:

If you thought Fortran and assembly language programming is pointless and purely for old-timers, guess again.

In an interview with Popular Mechanics this month, the manager of NASA's Voyager program Suzanne Dodd said the retirement of the project's last original engineer left the space agency with a shortage of people capable of communicating with the 40-year-old craft.

[...] "Although, some people can program in an assembly language and understand the intricacy of the spacecraft, most younger people can't or really don't want to," Dodd was quoted as saying.

With high-level languages now the standard for developers, knowing how to fluently code in assembly has become a specialized skill, as has fluency in languages such as Fortran. While obscure, the skill set is potentially lucrative. Along with NASA's aging fleet of spacecraft, many businesses still rely on languages such as Fortran or COBOL for specialized tasks and critical infrastructure.

[...] According to CNN, 80-year-old Larry Zottarelli is retiring from NASA next year, and he is the last original Voyager probe engineer. He will be replaced by a younger engineer, who has spent a year learning the ropes, we're told, proving that knowing a little bit about yesterday's technology can go a long way into the future.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

"The ORS-4 mission on an experimental Super Strypi launch vehicle failed in mid-flight after liftoff at 5:45 p.m. Hawaii Standard Time (7:45 p.m. PST/10:45 p.m. EST) today from the Pacific Missile Range Facility off Barking Sands, Kauai, Hawaii," the Air Force said in a brief statement early Nov. 4. "Additional information will be released as it becomes available."

After multiple delays, the fin-guided Super Strypi rocket finally lifted off from the U.S. Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility in Kauai in the first-ever orbital launch attempt from Hawaii. The range is used for testing of U.S. missile defense systems, among other things.

The debut of the rail-launched Super Strypi rocket was the key feature of the Operationally Responsive Space (ORS)-4 mission, which carried 13 experimental satellites.

http://spacenews.com/rail-launched-super-strypi-rocket-packed-with-cubesats-fails-after-liftoff/

Original Submission

Absolutely.Geek writes:

I have been looking to replace my 5 year old 13.3" Zenbook. But unfortunately it seemed like the manufacturers had really just stopped trying, what I discovered was that the best replacement for my Zenbook was my Zenbook. Basically the only difference between my Zenbook and the latest offering was a gen 5 i7 vs my current gen 3 i7, which really isn't much of an upgrade.

Then Microsoft goes and releases (in my opinion) the coolest peice of computer hardware in the last 5 years. The Surface book looks f'n awesome.

I have two issues:
1) it is mega expensive; for the 16GB/256GB/i7model it is $3300NZD; while I can afford it; it seems extravagant even with the potential of future upgrades to the keyboard module. Although an equivalent MacBook Pro 16GB/256GB/i7 is around $3500.

2) I'm a Linux guy and have been for years; I know eventually Linux will install on the Surface book but it wont happen tomorrow. So half of my tools that I commonly use will be annoying to get running or maybe not available.

I use Win7 at work and have just made my first foray into powershell scripting to get some automated tasks done...not bad. But the privacy implications of returning to windows really turn me off. My partner has a Surface pro 3 which all in all I think is a great device.

So what do the hordes of SN think of the Surface book?

Original Submission

shrewdsheep writes:

From the openSUSE news website:

The wait is over and a new era begins for openSUSE releases. Contributors, friends and fans can now download the first Linux hybrid distro openSUSE Leap 42.1. Since the last release, exactly one year ago, openSUSE transformed its development process to create an entirely new type of hybrid Linux distribution called openSUSE Leap.

Version 42.1 is the first version of openSUSE Leap that uses source from SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) providing a level of stability that will prove to be unmatched by other Linux distributions. Bonding community development and enterprise reliability provides more cohesion for the project and its contributor's maintenance updates. openSUSE Leap will benefit from the enterprise maintenance effort and will have some of the same packages and updates as SLE, which is different from previous openSUSE versions that created separate maintenance streams.

Community developers provide an equal level of contribution to Leap and upstream projects to the release, which bridges a gap between matured packages and newer packages found in openSUSE's other distribution Tumbleweed.

Since the move was such a shift from previous versions, a new version number and version naming strategy was adapted to reflect the change. The SLE sources come from SUSE's soon to be released SLE 12 Service Pack 1 (SP1). The naming strategy is SLE 12 SP1 or 12.1 + 30 = openSUSE Leap 42.1. Many have asked why 42, but SUSE and openSUSE have a tradition of starting big ideas with a four and two, a reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Original Submission

eof writes:

MIT News says researchers at MIT and the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) have developed a system that automatically converts 2-D video of soccer to 3-D video that can be played on any 3-D device.

Unfortunately, their system only works for soccer video and relies on the existence of a soccer video game.

"We are developing a conversion pipeline for a specific sport. We would like to do it at broadcast quality, and we would like to do it in real-time. What we have noticed is that we can leverage video games."

Today's video games generally store very detailed 3-D maps of the virtual environment that the player is navigating. When the player initiates a move, the game adjusts the map accordingly and, on the fly, generates a 2-D projection of the 3-D scene that corresponds to a particular viewing angle.

The MIT and QCRI researchers essentially ran this process in reverse. They set the very realistic Microsoft soccer game "FIFA13" to play over and over again, and used Microsoft's video-game analysis tool PIX to continuously store screen shots of the action. For each screen shot, they also extracted the corresponding 3-D map.

[...After] keeping just those [images] that best captured the range of possible viewing angles and player configurations that the game presented...they stored each screen shot and the associated 3-D map in a database.

[...] For every frame of 2-D video of an actual soccer game, the system looks for the 10 or so screen shots in the database that best correspond to it. Then it decomposes all those images, looking for the best matches between smaller regions of the video feed and smaller regions of the screen shots. Once it's found those matches, it superimposes the depth information from the screen shots on the corresponding sections of the video feed. Finally, it stitches the pieces back together.

The result is a very convincing 3-D effect, with no visual artifacts. The researchers conducted a user study in which the majority of subjects gave the 3-D effect a rating of 5 ("excellent") on a five-point ("bad" to "excellent") scale; the average score was between 4 ("good") and 5.

Original Submission

dbe writes:

In a kind of counter intuitive argument in this article in The Wall Street Journal , Uber drivers may now have to battle with the fact that no human is actually telling them what to do. Most of the tasks are now being automated. The study by Researchers at the Data and Society research institute at New York University point out that Uber uses software to exert similar control over workers that a human manager would.

The world looks more and more like the Manna short story, where every aspect of our employee life is used to classify our performance. Another interesting discussion point: Is the middle manager role disappearing?

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Mozilla Firefox 42 has been released.

In this version, Monica Chew's cross-site tracking protection (announced 10 November 2014) is now enabled during private browsing mode. Previously, the feature could be turned on by configuring privacy.trackingprotection.enabled via about:config—a situation which led to a ZDnet editorial criticizing Mozilla for a "lack of commitment" to the feature. Tracking protection blocks loading of elements from the third-party sites that are included in a blacklist from Disconnect. Besides hindering tracking, it is said to significantly reduce the load times of some pages. The blocked elements can include "analytics, social network buttons and display advertising."

The new version also corrects 17 security flaws, better indicates a site's security, and adds tools for animators.

in the news:

• Venture Beat
• PC World
• BetaNews
• TECHTIMES.com
• CIO
• CNET

Tech Crunch

[Let the HHGTTG quips begin. -Ed]

Original Submission

hoeferbe writes:

Today, Red Hat and Microsoft announced a partnership to provide greater choice and flexibility deploying Red Hat solutions on Microsoft Azure.  As a key component of today’s announcement, Microsoft is offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the preferred choice for enterprise Linux workloads on Microsoft Azure.  Another area of the partnership is in expanding the use of .NET in Red Hat's products, including the OpenShift Enterprise platform-as-a-service offering.

Paul Cormier, Red Hat's president of Products and Technologies, released a blog posting today about this partnership. From the blog:

Both Red Hat and Microsoft are key players in this new, hybrid cloud reality. Today, it is incredibly likely that where you once found “Red Hat shops” and “Microsoft shops,” you’ll find heterogeneous environments that include solutions from both companies. We heard from customers and partners that they wanted our solutions to work together - with consistent APIs, frameworks, management, and platforms. They not only wanted Red Hat offerings on Microsoft Azure, they wanted to be able to build .NET applications on infrastructure powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including OpenShift, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.

As customers move to a microservices architecture, I see a consistent enterprise platform and APIs for certified applications and container portability across physical, virtual, and private and public clouds becoming that much more important. Customers will want to be able to choose Microsoft Windows for Windows containers, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host and OpenShift for certified Red Hat Enterprise Linux containers unified by the common .NET framework.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Most people advance through their careers with legitimate training, and yet many professionals may still feel about as ill-qualified for their jobs as Demara was for his various "vocations."

Indeed, psychological scientists have explored the "impostor phenomenon," a term first coined in the 1970s to describe the intellectual and professional fraud that many high-achievers feel they're committing. Despite academic and career success, these individuals believe that others overestimate their abilities and will eventually discover their incompetence.

A team of Belgian psychological scientists recently set out to explore the impostor phenomenon (IP) more closely, and found that it correlated with specific personality, emotional, and behavioral traits. Professionals grappling with IP manifest high levels of maladaptive perfectionism and neuroticism, the researchers found. And those individuals tend to be relatively unhappy with their jobs.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Inside the Pentagon and the nation's spy agencies, the assessments of Russia's growing naval activities are highly classified and not publicly discussed in detail. American officials are secretive about what they are doing both to monitor the activity and to find ways to recover quickly if cables are cut. But more than a dozen officials confirmed in broad terms that it had become the source of significant attention in the Pentagon.

"I'm worried every day about what the Russians may be doing," said Rear Adm. Frederick J. Roegge, commander of the Navy's submarine fleet in the Pacific, who would not answer questions about possible Russian plans for cutting the undersea cables.

Cmdr. William Marks, a Navy spokesman in Washington, said: "It would be a concern to hear any country was tampering with communication cables; however, due to the classified nature of submarine operations, we do not discuss specifics."

In private, however, commanders and intelligence officials are far more direct. They report that from the North Sea to Northeast Asia and even in waters closer to American shores, they are monitoring significantly increased Russian activity along the known routes of the cables, which carry the lifeblood of global electronic communications and commerce.

Just last month, the Russian spy ship Yantar, equipped with two self-propelled deep-sea submersible craft, cruised slowly off the East Coast of the United States on its way to Cuba — where one major cable lands near the American naval station at Guantánamo Bay. It was monitored constantly by American spy satellites, ships and planes. Navy officials said the Yantar and the submersible vehicles it can drop off its decks have the capability to cut cables miles down in the sea.

See also a BBC story here.

Original Submission

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

As if they hadn't discredited the movement enough already, feminists are now reportedly attempting to collect scalps from notable men in tech. And they're not worried about little things like the sexual assault they report actually happening.

Feminists in tech have been staging attempted "honey traps" to frame prominent male software developers for sexual assault, according to explosive claims on the blog of Eric S. Raymond, a pioneer of the open source movement. In allegations that will rock the world of software development, prominent targets included Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel.

Raymond quoted excerpts from an online chat with a trusted source, who told him that the Ada Inititiative, a recently-discontinued feminist advocacy group in tech, was trying to "collect scalps" by concocting charges of attempted sexual assault against male software developers.

The source told Raymond that the "MO" of the feminists was to "get alone with the target, and then immediately report "attempted sexual assault." The source said he had stopped mentoring female developers over fears that they might fabricate such charges.

In before someone disbelieves the message because they dislike the messenger.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Isaac Newton, Wikipedia tells us, "is widely recognised as one of the most influential scientists of all time and as a key figure in the scientific revolution." George Boole (1815-1864) was undoubtedly also one of the most influential scientists of all time, and a key figure in the digital revolution. Both men were from Lincolnshire, England, and had Unitarian leanings, which impacted their career paths in the Anglican dominated world of their eras. Furthermore, both made key mental breakthroughs while enjoying fresh air outdoors.
...
Boole's came early in 1833, when he was only 17, while walking across a field in Doncaster:

"He relates that the thought flashed upon him suddenly, but he laid it aside for many years. The thought however smouldered in his subconscious and became an integral part of his main ambition in life—to explain the logic of human thought."

Boolean algebra and Boolean logic are very well known today, and form the backbone of electrical engineering and computer science. Indeed anyone who even casually searches the Internet , say for "Michael Jackson" the late beer and whiskey expert rather than the singer and dancer of the same name, knows how to make judicious use of AND, OR and NOT.

See, too: http://georgeboole.com/

Original Submission

takyon writes:

TorrentFreak reports that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has taken credit for recent shutdowns of torrent sites YTS and PopcornTime.io:

The major movie studios of the MPAA are behind the recent shutdown of the torrent site YTS, the associated release group YIFY, and the main Popcorn Time fork, PopcornTime.io. In an international effort spanning Canada and New Zealand, visits were carried out at the premises of at least two key suspects.

[...] The main Popcorn Time fork operating from the PopcornTime.io domain name closed its doors on October 23, citing internal issues. Part of the trouble was started by rumors of legal pressure, which the MPAA confirmed today.

The major movie studios have sued three Popcorn Time developers in Canada, the group announced in an official statement. The MPAA obtained an injunction on October 16 ordering the shutdown of the Popcorntime.io site. The complaint accuses the developers of various copyright infringing acts and also lists the VPN provider VPN.ht, which was operated by two of the Popcorn Time developers.

[...] The legal action in Canada was not an isolated incident, however. Around the same time, movie industry representatives targeted the operator of YTS/YIFY who's a New Zealand resident. The movie industry representatives had a warrant and threatened a multi-million dollar lawsuit, urging the operator to cooperate. YTS went dark two weeks ago as a result of the legal trouble and is not coming back.

Phoenix666 writes:

For the past few years, the big TV networks made easy money selling their reruns to Netflix.

Now they're having second thoughts.

So are they ready to pull back on sales to Netflix and other digital services in the hopes of keeping their core business intact?

Investors will be looking for an answer to that question this week and next, as most of the big entertainment companies report their Q3 earnings and take questions from analysts. But several key TV executives have already signaled that they're going to stop selling their best stuff to digital services — particularly Netflix.

Binge-viewing has been established as the new method to consume content--that is the genie they need to stuff back in the bottle.

Original Submission