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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Self-Flying Drone Startup Skydio Hits $1 Billion Valuation After $170 Million Raise:

Based in Redwood City, California, Skydio has built its reputation as both the leader in autonomous flight with its small $999 drones as well as an alternative to the $15 billion valued industry lead DJI. It's selling not just to consumers, but infrastructure companies, the military, search and rescue, and the police too. Amongst its publicly-known customers are the U.S. Army, the Drug Enforcement Administration, various local police agencies, the North Carolina Department of Transportation and what it calls the "largest ever enterprise drone deal" with EagleView for residential roof inspection.

Founded in 2014, Skydio released its first device in 2017, with the second iteration coming out in 2020. The X2, a more advanced and expensive drone designed for enterprise and military use, is out this year. It comes with a thermal camera and the ability to see in the dark, which previous models did not feature. Its most significant milestone this year came when it was chosen for final deployment in the Army Short Range Reconnaissance Program, indicating it will be one of the main suppliers for such military surveillance missions.

"Autonomy is the key for drones to reach scale, and Skydio has established themselves as the defining company in this category. We're excited to continue to invest in this magical combination of breakthrough technology, rapid growth, and an incredible team in a market that's going through an inflection point," said David Ulevitch, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. (According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission late last week, Skydio has raised $96 million of the $170 million round to date.)

As federal government customers, some local police departments and other businesses move away from DJI due to fears over its Chinese origins, Skydio is swooping in to fill the coming void.

[...] "We're proving that a U.S. company can lead the way in this industry through AI and autonomy. Things are already pretty exciting, but we are just scratching the surface of what autonomous drones can do," said Adam Bry, CEO and Skydio cofounder.

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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/02/report-stadia-undershot-to-the-tune-of-hundreds-of-thousands-of-users/

In the wake of Google shutting down its Stadia Games & Entertainment (SG&E) group, leaks about the underwhelming game-streaming service have started to emerge. A Friday Bloomberg report, citing unnamed Stadia sources, attaches a new number to the failures: "hundreds of thousands" fewer controllers sold and "monthly active users" (MAU) logging in than Google had anticipated.

[...] As part of his Stadia-launch mission, Harrison approved deals costing "tens of millions of dollars" to woo publishers like Take-Two and Ubisoft to launch their games on Stadia, Schreier reports. Exactly how many millions of dollars Stadia spent on these deals is unknown, but Schreier claims that "the amount of money Google was willing to spend came as a shock to veteran game developers," which implies a figure larger than $10 million.

[...] Also on Friday, Wired's Cecilia D'Anastasio published a report citing additional, unnamed sources on the woes of Stadia development. According to that report, Google forbade game developers in the SG&E group from "using certain game development software," which D'Anastasio likened to "roadblocks on the very fundamentals of game-making." Additionally, she reports that Stadia's ambitious goals for internal game studios were hamstrung by serious issues with Google infrastructure:

[...] Stadia continues to operate as a home for third-party games streamed from Google's servers to players' homes. Paid $10/mo Stadia Pro subscriptions include access to a library of over two dozen games, while "free" accounts can either buy Stadia game licenses à la carte or access free-to-play software like Destiny 2.

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aristarchus writes:

She came to the U.S. with $300. Now she's part of NASA's Mars mission.

When NASA's Perseverance rover successfully landed on Mars last week, aerospace engineer Diana Trujillo, who is a flight director on the mission, said in an interview with CBS News that it took her some time to process that it had arrived on the red planet.

"I was very much on the mindset of 'What's happening?'" she said. Then as pictures and videos from Perseverance started to beam back, it became real.

"Are we safe? I think that watching the image was when I actually processed that we had actually landed," she added.

The landing only marked the beginning of Perseverance's stop on Mars, but playing a leadership role in the historic mission to find life there was decades in the making for Trujillo. Her dreams of reaching space and wanting to understand the universe came as a young person in Cali, Colombia. Her parents were divorcing and as a 17-year-old, she decided to go to the United States, arriving with only $300 and not speaking any English. She worked housekeeping jobs to pay for her studies and later joined NASA in 2007.

[...] Trujillo is now part of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab and worked on the team that created the robotic arm that will collect rock samples on Mars. "Understanding if we're alone in the universe is the ultimate question," she said. "I hope that within the one year of surface operations on Mars, we can answer that question soon."

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Plastic bottles holding 2.3 litres are least harmful to the planet:

Using plastic bottles that contain the most liquid for the lowest packaging weight could help reduce plastic waste.

Plastic pollution is a huge problem for the world, with much plastic waste reaching the oceans where it can affect marine life.

In recognition of this, many researchers are developing strategies to tackle the plastic waste problem. Now, Rafael Becerril-Arreola at the University of South Carolina and his colleagues have come up with a relatively simple method to make a difference: change the packaging size to maximise its capacity for a given weight of plastic.

"We realised we could establish a relationship between supermarket beverage sales and plastic waste," says Becerril-Arreola. "I saw the opportunity to create an impact, and I took it."

[...] Becerril-Arreola says he hopes these findings encourage consumers to switch to more efficient bottles to help reduce plastic waste. "It's going to be tricky," he says. "It's a matter of awareness. We cannot expect corporations to make plastic bottles more efficient themselves."

Journal Reference:
R. Becerril-Arreola, R. E. Bucklin. Beverage bottle capacity, packaging efficiency, and the potential for plastic waste reduction [open], Scientific Reports (DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-82983-x)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

The Mac price crash of 2021 | ZDNet:

The impressive performance and battery life gains of the new M1 MacBooks have created a historic discontinuity in the normally placid resale market. Should you spend $800 for a one year old MacBook Air when for $200 more you could get a MacBook Air with several times the performance and 50 percent better battery life?

That's a question savvy buyers are asking themselves. Not surprisingly, the most common answer seems to be "Nope!"

[...] If you have an Intel MacBook Air or MacBook Pro and are thinking of trading up, you're likely to get more for your current 'Book by moving sooner rather than later. The Apple Silicon story is only going to get better. And the resale value of older Macs only worse.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Red Hat introduces free RHEL for open-source, non-profit organizations:

If your non-profit organization, project, standard body, or foundation is "engaged with open source," you can get a free RHEL subscription via this program. Earlier this year, Red Hat introduced no-cost RHEL for small production workloads and for customer development teams.

So where does this leave the Red Hat operating system family for open-source organizations? Currently, it looks like this:

• Fedora for driving leading-edge development of Linux operating system improvements and enhancements.
• CentOS Stream to test applications and workloads against the next release of the world's leading enterprise Linux platform.
• RHEL for Open Source Infrastructure to give open source communities, projects, foundations, and other organizations a stable foundation for creating and hosting innovative open-source software.

And, of course, you can always just pay for RHEL.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Best Buy just laid off 5,000 workers and will close more stores:

Best Buy said Thursday that it laid off 5,000 workers this month and is planning to close more stores this year as more consumers buy electronics online.

The news comes at a time when big chains face growing competition from Amazon and other sites that sell items like TVs and laptops. Fry's Electronics said Wednesday that it would abruptly close all of its stores overnight, ending nearly four-decades in business.

Best Buy BBY) expects 40% of its sales to come from online purchases this year, up from 19% two years ago, and the company said it needed to alter its workforce in response to this shift.

CEO Corie Barry told analysts Thursday that starting earlier this month, Best Buy had been adjusting the mix of full-time and part-time employees in stores, due to "having too many full-time and not enough part-time employees." As a result of this reorganization, Best Buy laid off 5,000 employees, the majority of whom worked full-time. It also said it is adding approximately 2,000 new part-time positions. Best Buy has around 102,000 employees.

Ars Technica notes in Best Buy lays off 5,000 workers as it shifts focus to online sales:

Best Buy says its recent changes are an effort to adjust to this new market reality. Traditional stores aren't going away, but they're becoming less important. Best Buy says that it has been closing about 20 stores per year over the last two years and expects to accelerate the process in the coming year. Best Buy has 450 stores (out of roughly 1,000) whose leases will run out in the next three years. The company says that it always rigorously evaluates a store before renewing its lease, but in the future, the company will have "higher thresholds on renewing leases." In other words, under-performing stores will get shuttered more quickly than in the past.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AzumaHazuki:

Ultrasound triggers brain's waste disposal system in Alzheimer's patients:

Using ultrasound as a way of treating Alzheimer's is starting to gain some traction on the back of promising research in rodents. Much of this centers on how targeted ultrasound can open the blood brain barrier to enable the passage of drugs to destroy the buildup of amyloid plaques, which are associated with the progression of the disease.

In this new study, carried out at West Virginia University, scientists dove a little deeper into the physiological effects of opening the blood brain barrier. The experiments involved three volunteers with early-stage Alzheimer's aged 61, 72 and 73, who received ultrasound treatment targeting the hippocampus, the region associated with learning and memory capacity. Contrast-enhancement dyes were used and observed with MRI scans to track the resulting changes in the brain, which showed the dye moving through what are known as draining veins.

"This imaging pattern was unexpected and enhances our understanding of brain physiology," says Rashi Mehtam, who led the research. "The glymphatic system, which is a fluid-movement and waste-clearance system that's unique to the brain, has been studied in animals, but there is controversy about whether this system truly exists in humans. The imaging pattern that we discuss in the paper offers evidence not only to support that the system does likely exist in humans but that focused ultrasound may modulate fluid movement patterns and immunological responses along this system."

takyon writes:

Lyra: A New Very Low-Bitrate Codec for Speech Compression

Since the inception of Lyra, our mission has been to provide the best quality audio using a fraction of the bitrate data of alternatives. Currently, the royalty-free open-source codec Opus, is the most widely used codec for WebRTC-based VOIP applications and, with audio at 32kbps, typically obtains transparent speech quality, i.e., indistinguishable from the original. However, while Opus can be used in more bandwidth constrained environments down to 6kbps, it starts to demonstrate degraded audio quality. Other codecs are capable of operating at comparable bitrates to Lyra (Speex, MELP, AMR), but each suffer from increased artifacts and result in a robotic sounding voice.

Lyra is currently designed to operate at 3kbps and listening tests show that Lyra outperforms any other codec at that bitrate and is compared favorably to Opus at 8kbps, thus achieving more than a 60% reduction in bandwidth. Lyra can be used wherever the bandwidth conditions are insufficient for higher-bitrates and existing low-bitrate codecs do not provide adequate quality.

[...] The implications of technologies like Lyra are far reaching, both in the short and long term. With Lyra, billions of users in emerging markets can have access to an efficient low-bitrate codec that allows them to have higher quality audio than ever before. Additionally, Lyra can be used in cloud environments enabling users with various network and device capabilities to chat seamlessly with each other. Pairing Lyra with new video compression technologies, like AV1, will allow video chats to take place, even for users connecting to the internet via a 56kbps dial-in modem.

This should help make an 8 MiB copy of Shrek sound even better.

Also at CNX Software and Phoronix.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Meet Catfish Charlie, the CIA's Robotic Spy:

When the CIA's Office of Advanced Technologies and Programs started conducting some fish-focused research in the 1990s, Charlie must have seemed like the perfect code name. Except that the CIA's Charlie was a catfish. And it was a robot.

More precisely, Charlie was an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) designed to surreptitiously collect water samples. Its handler controlled the fish via a line-of-sight radio handset. Not much has been revealed about the fish's construction except that its body contained a pressure hull, ballast system, and communications system, while its tail housed the propulsion. At 61 centimeters long, Charlie wouldn't set any biggest-fish records. (Some species of catfish can grow to 2 meters.) Whether Charlie reeled in any useful intel is unknown, as details of its missions are still classified.

[...] Whatever their official purpose, these nature-inspired robocreatures can inspire us in return. UUVs that open up new and wondrous vistas on the world's oceans can extend humankind's ability to explore. We create them, and they enhance us, and that strikes me as a very fair and worthy exchange.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

AI Teaches Itself Diplomacy

Now that DeepMind has taught AI to master the game of Go—and furthered its advantage in chess—they've turned their attention to another board game: Diplomacy. Unlike Go, it is seven-player, it requires a combination of competition and cooperation, and on each turn players make moves simultaneously, so they must reason about what others are reasoning about them, and so on.

"It's a qualitatively different problem from something like Go or chess," says Andrea Tacchetti, a computer scientist at DeepMind. In December, Tacchetti and collaborators presented a paper at the NeurIPS conference on their system, which advances the state of the art, and may point the way toward AI systems with real-world diplomatic skills—in negotiating with strategic or commercial partners or simply scheduling your next team meeting.

Diplomacy is a strategy game played on a map of Europe divided into 75 provinces. Players build and mobilize military units to occupy provinces until someone controls a majority of supply centers. Each turn, players write down their moves, which are then executed simultaneously. They can attack or defend against opposing players' units, or support opposing players' attacks and defenses, building alliances. In the full version, players can negotiate. DeepMind tackled the simpler No-Press Diplomacy, devoid of explicit communication.

The only winning move is to kill all humans.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow639:

Heavily used Node.js package has a code injection vulnerability:

A heavily downloaded Node.js library has a high severity command injection vulnerability revealed this month.

Tracked as CVE-2021-21315, the bug impacts the "systeminformation" npm component which gets about 800,000 weekly downloads and has scored close to 34 million downloads to date since its inception.

Put simply, "systeminformation" is a lightweight Node.js library that developers can include in their project to retrieve system information related to CPU, hardware, battery, network, services, and system processes.

[...] "This library is still work in progress. It is supposed to be used as a backend/server-side library (will definitely not work within a browser)," states the developer behind the component.

However, the presence of the code injection flaw within "systeminformation" meant an attacker could execute system commands by carefully injecting payload within the unsanitized parameters used by the component.

[...] Users of "systeminformation" should upgrade to versions 5.3.1 and above to resolve the CVE-2021-21315 vulnerability in their application.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Researchers Say They've Solved the Puzzling Mystery of the Moons of Mars:

Mars's two moons, Phobos and Deimos, have puzzled researchers since their discovery in 1877. They are very small: Phobos's diameter of 22 kilometers is 160 times smaller than that of our Moon, and Deimos is even smaller, with a diameter of only 12 kilometers. "Our moon is essentially spherical, while the moons of Mars are very irregularly shaped – like potatoes," says Amirhossein Bagheri, a doctoral student at the Institute of Geophysics at ETH Zurich, adding: "Phobos and Deimos look more like asteroids than natural moons."

This led people to suspect that they might in fact be asteroids that were captured in Mars's gravity field. "But that's where the problems started," Bagheri says. Captured objects would be expected to follow an eccentric orbit around the planet, and that orbit would be at a random inclination. In contradiction to this hypothesis, the orbits of the Martian moons are almost circular and move in the equatorial plane of Mars. So, what is the explanation for the current orbits of Phobos and Deimos? To solve this dynamic problem, the researchers relied on computer simulations.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

The Famous Basic Computer Games Book Gets A 2021 Update:

If you are a certain age, your first programming language was almost certainly BASIC. You probably at least saw the famous book by Ahl, titled BASIC Computer Games or 1010[sic] BASIC Computer Games. The book, published in 1973 by [David Ahl] was a staple in its day and the first computer book to sell over one million copies. Of course, if you want to run Super Star Trek or Hamurabi, you better fire up an old retrocomputer or a simulator because BASIC in 1973 doesn't look like what we have today. Or, you can head to GitHub where [coding-horror] is inviting people to help update the programs using modern languages.

[...] By today's standards, these games are pretty crude, but they are still engaging and, if you remember them, always nostalgic.  There is one thing missing, though. In 1973, you had no choice but to type the programs in yourself. You couldn't help but learn something about programming in the process. Besides, you then had to debug the program to find your typing mistakes and that was definitely educational. It might seem like these games are ultra-simple, but hexapawn does machine learning and the lunar lander game is a simple physics simulation.

[...] Seeing some of these old gems is like unexpectedly running into an old friend. If you want to help out, there's a discussion board available.

NOTE: Prior to uploading to GitHub, all programs were updated to run on Vintage Basic.

Wikipedia entry for BASIC Computer Games.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

The Framework laptop is coming this spring (hopefully) a laptop that can be upgraded and repaired easier then most machines today on the market.

The Framework Laptop is an upgradable, customizable 13-inch notebook coming this spring:

A San Francisco-based startup called Framework has just launched an ambitious project: a thin, lightweight productivity laptop that it claims can be "upgraded, customized, and repaired in ways that no other notebook can."

Framework founder Nirav Patel told The Verge that the company aims to address his long-standing frustrations with consumer technology companies. Patel was one of the original Oculus employees and has worked for Apple as well. During that time, he says he "saw an industry that felt incredibly broken across the board."

"As a consumer electronics company, your business model effectively depends on churning out constant tons of hardware and pushing it into channels, and into market, and into consumers' hands, and then sort of dropping it and letting it exist out there," Patel explains. "It encourages waste and inefficiency, and ultimately environmental damage."

To that end, Patel sees the Framework Laptop as more than a product — he sees it as an ecosystem.

The Framework comes with a 13.5-inch 2256 x 1504 screen, a 1080p 60fps webcam, a 55Wh battery, and a 2.87-pound aluminum chassis. Inside, you’ll get 11th Gen Intel processors, up to 64GB of DDR4 memory, and “4TB or more” of Gen4 NVMe storage.

[...] Framework will be taking preorders this spring, and the device is expected to ship this summer. Pricing hasn’t yet been announced, though Patel says it will be “comparable to other well-reviewed notebooks.”

Original Submission