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takyon writes:

The U.S. leads the June 2018 TOP500 list with a 122.3 petaflops system:

The TOP500 celebrates its 25th anniversary with a major shakeup at the top of the list. For the first time since November 2012, the US claims the most powerful supercomputer in the world, leading a significant turnover in which four of the five top systems were either new or substantially upgraded.

Summit, an IBM-built supercomputer now running at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), captured the number one spot with a performance of 122.3 petaflops on High Performance Linpack (HPL), the benchmark used to rank the TOP500 list. Summit has 4,356 nodes, each one equipped with two 22-core Power9 CPUs, and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. The nodes are linked together with a Mellanox dual-rail EDR InfiniBand network.

[...] Sierra, a new system at the DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory took the number three spot, delivering 71.6 petaflops on HPL. Built by IBM, Sierra's architecture is quite similar to that of Summit, with each of its 4,320 nodes powered by two Power9 CPUs plus four NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs and using the same Mellanox EDR InfiniBand as the system interconnect.

The #100 system has an Rmax of 1.703 petaflops, up from 1.283 petaflops in November. The #500 system has an Rmax of 715.6 teraflops, up from 548.7 teraflops in June.

273 systems have a performance of at least 1 petaflops, up from 181 systems. The combined performance of the top 500 systems is 1.22 exaflops, up from 845 petaflops.

On the Green500 list, Shoubu system B's efficiency has been adjusted to 18.404 gigaflops per Watt from 17.009 GFLOPS/W. The Summit supercomputer, #1 on TOP500, debuts at #5 on the Green500 with 13.889 GFLOPS/W. Japan's AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI) supercomputer, #5 on TOP500 (19.88 petaflops Rmax), is #8 on the Green500 with 12.054 GFLOPS/W.

Previously: TOP500 List #50 and Green500 List #21: November 2017

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takyon writes:

Blue Origin plans to start selling suborbital spaceflight tickets next year

Blue Origin expects to start flying people on its New Shepard suborbital vehicle "soon" and start selling tickets for commercial flights next year, a company executive said June 19.

Speaking at the Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit here, as the keynote of a half-day track on earth and space applications, Blue Origin Senior Vice President Rob Meyerson offered a few updates on the development of the company's suborbital vehicle. "We plan to start flying our first test passengers soon," he said after showing a video of a previous New Shepard flight at the company's West Texas test site. All of the New Shepard flights to date have been without people on board, but the company has said in the past it would fly its personnel on the vehicle in later tests.

[...] Even the company's billionaire owner has not disclosed details. "We don't know the ticket price yet. We haven't decided," said Jeff Bezos in an on-stage interview May 25 at the National Space Society's International Space Development Conference in Los Angeles. That approach stands in stark contrast to Virgin Galactic, the other company in the advanced stages of development of a commercial suborbital vehicle capable of carrying people. Virgin Galactic started selling tickets more than a decade ago, even while SpaceShipTwo was still in the early stages of development. The company has approximately 700 customers who have paid at least a deposit.

Also at Quartz.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Linus Torvalds has given the Linux kernel development community a bit of a touch-up, after finding some contributions to Linux 4.18 complicated the kernel development process.

In his post announcing release candidate 2 of Linux kernel 4.18, Torvalds mentioned “some noticeable filesystem updates, particularly to cifs.”

“I'm going to point those out, because some of them probably shouldn't have been in rc2. They were ‘fixes’ not in the ‘regressions’ sense, but in the ‘missing features’ sense.”

Torvalds’ beef is that people have been adding new stuff to the kernel in release candidates and calling it a fix.

“So please, people, the ‘fixes’ during the rc series really should be things that are _regressions_. If it used to work, and it no longer does, then fixing that is a good and proper fix. Or if something oopses or has a security implication, then the fix for that is a real fix.”

“But if it's something that has never worked, even if it ‘fixes’ some behavior, then it's new development, and that should come in during the merge window. Just because you think it's a ‘fix’ doesn't mean that it really is one, at least in the ‘during the rc series’ sense.”

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c0lo writes:

BBC,

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders was kicked out of a restaurant on Friday night because she works for President Donald Trump. A co-owner of the Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia, asked Ms Sanders and her family to leave as a protest against the Trump administration.

She told the Washington Post that she decided to ask the Trump spokeswoman to leave the 26-seat, "farm-to-table" restaurant after talking to her staff. "Tell me what you want me to do. I can ask her to leave," she said she told them. "They said yes."

The incident comes days after Homeland Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was booed at a Mexican restaurant in Washington DC. Critics of the Red Hen's decision said that it was discriminatory. However, others compared the restaurant's decision to a recent Supreme Court ruling in favour of a baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple, in a case seen by many conservatives as a test for religious freedom.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Internet Engineering Task Force has taken another step on its road to independence, publishing a for-discussion proposal covering its likely administrative arrangements.

It's part of a process we first reported in April of this year, designed to formalise the arrangements that keep the 'net's technical standards flowing. The effort also aims to give the IETF a formal administrative existence, something it's lacked despite being around since the early days of the Internet.

Creating a proper entity matters for the day-to-day administrivia of signing off spending and the like, and the group has published an outline of how it proposes to structure itself.

In this Internet-Draft, Brian Haberman, Joseph Lorenzo Hall and Jason Livingood propose transferring responsibilities currently held by the Internet Administrative Director and the Internet Society (ISOC) to a newly-created company to handle those roles.

The board of the company would take over the work of the IETF Administrative Oversight Committee (IAOC), which currently provides the financial and administrative support the IETF needs to function.

[...] The company would also need to remain responsive to its community, the draft stated, and will be responsible for exercising diligence to minimise risks to IETF participants and the IETF as a whole.

The draft also covers board and management responsibilities, board composition and recruitment, the make-up of an interim board for the setup period, and so on.

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takyon writes:

Monitor manufacturers may be putting 4K UHD (3840 × 2160) panels in some 1440p QHD (2560 × 1440) monitors. This can cause blurriness since one pixel would be mapped onto one and a half pixels:

Citing sources close to panel manufacturers, German website Prad.de writes that the costs of producing a 27-inch 4K 3840 x 2160 panel is often lower, or at least the same price as, creating a 27-inch 2560 x 1440 QHD panel. As such, some companies have reportedly been producing monitors that use 4K panels despite being advertised as 1440p. This is said to happen often when panel supplies are low, or monitor demand is high.

[...] Prad.de included a simulated monitor test image in its report (below). It shows native 1440p on the top and 1440p scaled to 4K on the bottom.

Also at TechPowerUp.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Reserve Bank of India has given that country's banking sector a hard deadline to get Windows XP out of its ATMs: June 2019. That's more than five years beyond the May 2014 end of support for the OS.

In a notice to the nation's banks, issued last on June 21st, 2018, the Reserve Bank makes it clear that XP “and other unsupported operating systems” have been on its mind since at least April 2017, when it issued a circular outlining its concerns.

In spite of previous advisories instructing banks to put migration plans in place, things have not moved fast enough for the RBI.

“The slow progress on the part of the banks in addressing these issues has been viewed seriously by the RBI,” the notice said, adding that "the vulnerability arising from the banks’ ATMs operating on unsupported version of operating system and non-implementation of other security measures, could potentially affect the interests of the banks’ customers adversely".

The timetable says banks must reach 25 per cent deprecation by September 2018; 50 per cent by December 2018; and 75 per cent by March 2019.

The timetable also requires banks to implement anti-skimming technology, and to use whitelisting on ATMs so only approved software can run on them. Banks have been instructed to file their compliance plans by the end of July 2018.

[Editor's Note: Removed spurious line 1432UTC]

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Dozens of carbon monoxide alarms sold over Amazon and eBay have been withdrawn from sale after failing safety tests.

Four alarms available for sale on the retail websites failed to detect the presence of the gas, making them potentially lethal in the event of a carbon monoxide build-up in a home, an investigation by Which? found.

The consumer group urged anyone who purchased one of the devices – which all claimed to meet British safety standards – to replace them.

One of the alarms, the Topolek GEHS007AW CO, failed to detect the gas in more than 80 per cent of the tests conducted by the watchdog. It was bestseller on Amazon, where it retailed at £14.99.

Three other unbranded alarms, made in China and sold through Amazon and eBay for less than £10, also repeatedly failed to sound when there was carbon monoxide in the air.

[...] Amazon and eBay have removed the alarms from sale and also “de-listed” another 50 lookalike alarms believed to be identical to the three unbranded alarms.

Which? advised anyone who owns one of the alarms to replace it immediately and to contact the company they bought it from for a full refund.

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takyon writes:

With Instagram looming, YouTube is trying to keep its creators happy

YouTube is realizing it needs to treat its creators better, now that rival Instagram is making a play for them with its own video platform, IGTV.

The video service announced on Thursday three new ways for YouTubers to make money on its platform, during a presentation at the online video convention, VidCon, in Anaheim, California.

In the next few months, audiences will be able to support their favorite channels within YouTube by paying $4.99 per month to become a member of that channel's community and get access to exclusive posts, videos, live streams and other perks offered by the creator. The program, called Channel Memberships, will be available to channels with 100,000 subscribers or more that meet certain standards, like being eligible for ads and run by creators over the age of 18. The feature, previously called Sponsorships, launched last fall on YouTube Gaming to compete with rival streaming services Twitch, and will soon be made available on YouTube more broadly.

YouTube is also partnering with custom t-shirt company Teespring to allow creators to customize and sell merchandise directly through their channels, as of this week. Many YouTubers, large and small, already make and sell merchandise on their own for extra cash. Not to mention, hawk it incessantly in their videos.

Your video channel has been demonetized. Sorry about that :/

Previously: Facebook/Instagram vs. Twitch and YouTube

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Bitcoin Baron, a self-proclaimed vigilante responsible for DDoS attacks on civic networks in Madison, Wisc., San Marcos, Texas, and other sites in 2015, has been collared in Phoenix and sentenced to serve 20 months in prison.

The conviction and sentencing is only for the former attack, in which Randall Charles Tucker, who was 20 at the time, disabled the City of Madison’s website for six days, crippled the 911 emergency communication system and degraded the emergency service dispatch system. He went on to boast about the attacks on social media, according to the court documents, and on Skype chats in his gaming community.

The attack’s motivation is unclear, but it came shortly after a fatal shooting of a 19-year-old unarmed black man by a Madison police officer sparked outrage. Police brutality soon became a recurring theme for Tucker.

[...] The hacker pleaded guilty in April of last year to one count of intentional damage to a protected computer, in Madison.

In addition to the jail time, U.S. District Judge Douglas L. Rayes of the District of Arizona also ordered Tucker to pay $69,331.56 in restitution.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

European Union lawmakers are unhappy that Facebook is refusing to comply with their request to send two senior officials to testify at a hearing into the Cambridge Analytica data scandal.

The EU parliament's Civil Liberties Committee wants to question Facebook's chief privacy officer and the vice presidents for advertisements and global public policy.

The committee said Friday that global public policy vice president Joel Kaplan will attend Monday's hearing, but he will only be accompanied two members of Facebook's public policy team.

Committee Chairman Claude Moraes said "we had expected to hear from other speakers."

Moraes said "it will be up to members to see if Facebook's answers will be sufficient, convincing and trustworthy."

Initially, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declined to appear before the assembly but finally attended last month.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps was supposed to be in space right now, as the first African-American crew member living on the International Space Station. But instead she's on the ground doing all of the things astronauts do when they're not in space—training, monitoring programs, working as a capcom in Mission Control, and more.

Since being pulled from her flight in January, a mission that launched about two weeks ago for a six-month tour on the space station, Epps has remained quiet in public. NASA did not specify the reasons for her removal from Expedition 56 to the space station, saying only that, "These decisions are personnel matters for which NASA doesn’t provide information."

However, Epps did finally speak publicly this week, appearing at the Tech Open Air technology festival in Berlin on June 21, where she was interviewed by journalist Megan Gannon. The website CollectSPACE provided a transcript of the discussion.

Asked why she was taken off the Expedition 56 flight, Epps said she could not go into great detail. “I can't speculate in this forum why that was done, but it was a decision of my management and it is something that we're going to try to work through,” she said. However, Epps noted that she passed all of her NASA training, her Russian training, as well as exams for operating European and Japanese modules on the space station.

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takyon writes:

Nathan Myhrvold: 'Nasa doesn't want to admit it's wrong about asteroids'

Nathan Myhrvold is the former chief technology officer of Microsoft, founder of the controversial patent asset company Intellectual Ventures and the main author of the six-volume, 2,300-page Modernist Cuisine cookbook, which explores the science of cooking. Currently, he is taking on Nasa over its measurement of asteroid sizes.

For the past couple of years, you've been fighting with Nasa about its analysis of near-Earth asteroid size. You've just published a 33-page scientific paper [open, DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2018.05.004] [DX] criticising the methods used by its Neowise project team to estimate the size and other properties of approximately 164,000 asteroids. You have also published a long blog post explaining the problem. Where did Nasa go wrong and is it over or underestimating size?

Nasa's Wise space telescope [Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer] measured the asteroids in four different wavelengths in the infrared. My main beef is with how they analysed that data. What I think happened is they made some poor choices of statistical methods. Then, to cover that up, they didn't publish a lot of the information that would help someone else replicate it. I'm afraid they have both over- and underestimated. The effect changes depending on the size of the asteroid and what it's made of. The studies were advertised as being accurate to plus or minus 10%. In fact, it is more like 30-35%. That's if you look overall. If you look at specific subsets some of them are off by more than 100%. It's kind of a mess.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

RNA modifications can encrypt the RNA code and are responsible for a very sophisticated control of RNA function. A Danish-German research team has shown that modified RNA bases have a great impact on the dynamics of gene expression from DNA to functional RNA. The study yields important new insight into how the basis of RNA modifications can affect the function of mature RNA molecules.The genetic material, DNA, is located in the cell nucleus where gene expression is controlled. DNA is copied into the less stable RNA for translation into protein in the cytoplasm (mRNA or protein-coding RNA) or for mediating independent functions as non-coding RNA. RNA is processed through several maturation steps to ensure its proper expression and localization. One of these maturation steps is called splicing. The non-functional introns are excised from the newly made RNA in the splicing process to build a mature and functional RNA consisting of exons only.

RNA is composed of four bases (abbreviated A, U, G and C), thereby disseminating its message with a fairly simple code. In recent years, research has shown an unprecedented impact of RNA modifications at all steps of the maturation process. More than a hundred RNA modifications have been identified with roles in both inhibiting and facilitating binding to proteins, DNA and other RNA molecules. This encryption by RNA modification is a way to prevent the message of the RNA in being read by the wrong recipients.

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takyon writes:

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

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