technology – Page 205

Australia Has Moved 1.5 Metres, So It’s Updating Its Location For Self-Driving Cars

An anonymous reader shares a CNET report: Australia is changing from “down under” to “down under and across a bit”. The country is shifting its longitude and latitude to fix a discrepancy with global satellite navigation systems. Government body Geoscience Australia is updating the Geocentric Datum of Australia, the country’s national coordinate system, to bring it in line with international data. The reason Australia is slightly out of whack with global systems is that the country moves about 7 centimetres (2.75 inches) per year due to the shifting of tectonic plates. Since 1994, when the data was last recorded, that’s added up to a misalignment of about a metre and a half. While that might not seem like much, various new technology requires location data to be pinpoint accurate. Self-driving cars, for example, must have infinitesimally precise location data to avoid accidents. Drones used for package delivery and driverless farming vehicles also require spot-on information.ABC has more details. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Office 365 Gets New Word, PowerPoint and Outlook Features

New submitter Miche67 writes: As part of the July 2016 update to Office 365, Microsoft is adding several features across the board to Word, PowerPoint and Outlook. Word, however, is getting the biggest new features — Researcher and Editor — to improve your writing. “As its name implies, Researcher is designed to help the user find reliable sources of information by using the Bing Knowledge Graph to search for sources, and it will properly cite them in the Word document, ” reports Network World. “[Editor] builds on the already-existing spellchecker and thesaurus to offer suggestions on how to improve your overall writing. In addition to the wavy red line under a misspelled word and the wavy blue line under bad grammar, there will be a gold line for writing style.” The new features are expected to be available later this year. In addition to the two new features added to PowerPoint last year — Designer and Morph, Microsoft is offering Zoom, a feature that lets you easily create “interactive, non-linear presentations.” “Instead of the 1-2-3-4 linear method of presenting slides, forcing you to place them all in the order you wish to display, presenters will be able to show their slides in any order they want at any time, ” reports Network World. “This way you can change your presentation order as needed without having to stop PowerPoint or interrupt the display.” As for Outlook, Focused Inbox is coming to Office 365. Focused Inbox separates your inbox into two tabs. The “Focused” tab is where all of your high-priority emails will be found, while everything else will be in the “Other” tab. Outlook will learn from your behavior over time and sort your mail accordingly. In addition, @mentions are coming to Outlook 365 and Outlook for PC and Mac, “making it easy to identify emails that need your attention, as well as flag actions for others.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Office 365 Gets New Word, PowerPoint and Outlook Features

Nintendo NX Is a Portable Console With Detachable Controllers, Says Report

An anonymous reader writes from a report via Eurogamer.net: We now have a good idea as to what the Nintendo NX will consist of thanks to a new report from Eurogamer. According to a number of sources, Nintendo’s upcoming NX will be a portable, handheld console with detachable controllers. Eurogamer.net reports: “On the move, NX will function as a high-powered handheld console with its own display. So far so normal — but here’s the twist: we’ve heard the screen is bookended by two controller sections on either side, which can be attached or detached as required. Then, when you get home, the system can connect to your TV for gaming on the big screen. A base unit, or dock station, is used to connect the brain of the NX — within the controller — to display on your TV. NX will use game cartridges as its choice of physical media, multiple sources have also told [Eurogamer]. Another source said the system would run on a new operating system from Nintendo. It won’t, contrary to some earlier rumors, simply run on Android. The system will harness Nvidia’s powerful mobile processor Tegra. Graphical comparisons with current consoles are difficult due to the vastly different nature of the device — but once again we’ve heard Nintendo is not chasing graphical parity. Quite the opposite, it is sacrificing power to ensure it can squeeze all of this technology into a handheld, something which also tallies with earlier reports. Finally, we’ve heard from one source that NX planning has recently moved up a gear within Nintendo ahead of the console’s unveiling, which is currently slated for September. After the confused PR fiasco of the Wii U launch, the company is already settling on a simple marketing message for NX — of being able to take your games with you on the go.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Nintendo NX Is a Portable Console With Detachable Controllers, Says Report

Vine’s Source Code Was Accidentally Made Public For Five Minutes

An anonymous reader writes from The Register: Vine, the six-second-video-loop app acquired by Twitter in 2012, had its source code made publicly available by a bounty-hunter for everyone to see. The Register reports: “According to this post by @avicoder (Vjex at GitHub), Vine’s source code was for a while available on what was supposed to be a private Docker registry. While docker.vineapp.com, hosted at Amazon, wasn’t meant to be available, @avicoder found he was able to download images with a simple pull request. After that it’s all too easy: the docker pull https://docker.vineapp.com:443/library/vinewww request loaded the code, and he could then open the Docker image and run it. ‘I was able to see the entire source code of Vine, its API keys and third party keys and secrets. Even running the image without any parameter, [it] was letting me host a replica of Vine locally.’ The code included ‘API keys, third party keys and secrets, ‘ he writes. Twitter’s bounty program paid out — $10, 080 — and the problem was fixed in March (within five minutes of him demonstrating the issue).” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Vine’s Source Code Was Accidentally Made Public For Five Minutes

Glassdoor Exposes 600,000 Email Addresses

A web site where users anonymously review their employer has exposed the e-mail addresses — and in some cases the names — of hundreds of thousands of users. An anonymous reader quotes an article from Silicon Beat: On Friday, the company sent out an email announcing that it had changed its terms of service. Instead of blindly copying email recipients on the message, the company pasted their addresses in the clear. Each message recipient was able to see the email addresses of 999 other Glassdoor users… Ultimately, the messages exposed the addresses of more than 2 percent of the company’s users… Last month, the company said it had some 30 million monthly active users, meaning that more than 600, 000 were affected by the exposure… Although the company didnâ(TM)t directly disclose the names of its users, many of their names could be intuited from their email addresses. Some appeared to be in the format of “first name.last name” or “first initial plus last name.” A Glassdoor spokesperson said “We are extremely sorry for this error. We take the privacy of our users very seriously and we know this is not what is expected of us. It certainly isn’t how we intend to operate.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Turn Your Android Phone Into a Laptop For $99 With the Superbook

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: A company called Andromium is attempting to harness the processing power of your Android smartphone and turn it into a full fledged computer. The ‘Superbook’ consists of a 11.6-inch laptop shell, which you connect to your phone via a USB Micro-B or Type-C cable, and run the Andromium OS application (currently in beta, but available in the Play Store)… The leader of the project and Company co-founder Gordon Zheng, previously worked at Google and pitched the idea to them… They refused so he quit his job and founded Andromium Inc. In December 2014 the company had introduced their first product which was a dock which used the MHL standard to output to external monitor. That campaign failed, however their newest creation, the Superbook smashed their Kickstarter goal in just over 20 minutes. And within their first 38 hours, they’d crowdfunded $500, 000. In an intriguing side note, Andromium “says it’ll open its SDK so developers can tailor their apps for Andromium, too, though how much support that gets remains to be seen, ” reports Tech Insider. But more importantly, “Andromium says its prototypes are finished, and that it hopes to ship the Superbook to backers by February 2017.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Turn Your Android Phone Into a Laptop For $99 With the Superbook

How (And Why) FreeDOS Keeps DOS Alive

FreeDOS was originally created in response to Microsoft’s announcement that after Windows 95, DOS would no longer be developed as a standalone operating system, according to a new interview about how (and why) Jim Hall keeps FreeDOS alive. For its newest version, Hall originally imagined “what ‘DOS’ would be like in 2015 or 2016 if Microsoft hadn’t stopped working on MS-DOS in favor of Windows” — before he decided there’s just no such thing as “modern DOS”. An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: No major changes are planned in the next version. “The next version of FreeDOS won’t be multitasking, it won’t be 32-bit, it won’t run on ARM, ” Hall said. “FreeDOS is still intended for Intel and Intel-compatible computers. You should still be able to run FreeDOS on your old 486 or old Pentium PC to play classic DOS games, run legacy business programs, and support embedded development.” By day, Hall is the CIO for a county in Minnesota, and he’s also a member of the board of directors for GNOME (and contributes to other open source projects) — but he still remembers using DOS’s built-in BASIC system to write simple computer programs. “Many of us older computer nerds probably used DOS very early, on our first home computer…” he tells ComputerWorld. Even without John Romero’s new Doom level, “The popularity of DOS games and DOS shareware applications probably contributes in a big way to FreeDOS’s continued success.” I’d be curious how many Slashdot readers have some fond memories about downloading DOS shareware applications. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How (And Why) FreeDOS Keeps DOS Alive

Leak Shows PlayStation 4 Neo Is Expected To Have Twice The Graphics Horsepower

MojoKid writes from a report via HotHardware: Following rumors of a more powerful console in Sony’s not-too-distant future — one that will be capable of playing games at a 4K resolution — the Japanese electronics maker last month opted to confirm it is indeed in development. Called PlayStation 4 Neo, the upgraded system will bring better hardware to the console scene to meet the needs of gaming on a television with four times as many pixels as a Full HD 1080p display. What’s it going to take to game at 4K in the living room? A leaked internal document outlines some very interesting specs of the new model PS4 console. Assuming the leaked document is up to date with Sony’s current plans, the PS4 Neo will use the same Jaguar cores as the original PS4, but clocked 500MHz faster, with 8 cores at 2.1GHz (up from 1.6GHz). The more significant upgrade will be the GPU. According to the slide, the PS4 Neo will use an improved version of AMD’s GCN compute units (CUs), with twice the number of CUs at 36 instead of 18. They’ll also be clocked faster — 911MHz versus 800MHz. The net result is a 2.3x improvement in floating point performance. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Leak Shows PlayStation 4 Neo Is Expected To Have Twice The Graphics Horsepower

Ubuntu Linux Forums Hacked — IP Address, Username, Email of 2M Accounts Compromised

Canonical announced on Friday that Ubuntu forums have been hacked. The company adds that data such as IP address, username, and email address of over two million users have been compromised. BetaNews reports: Keep in mind, this does not mean that the operating system has experienced a vulnerability or weakness. The only thing affected are the online forums that people use to discuss the OS. Still, such a hack is embarrassing as it happened due to Canonical’s failure to install a patch.In a blog post, Jane Silber, Chief Executive Officer, Canonical said, “after some initial investigation, we were able to confirm there had been an exposure of data and shut down the Forums as a precautionary measure. Deeper investigation revealed that there was a known SQL injection vulnerability in the Forumrunner add-on in the Forums which had not yet been patched.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ubuntu Linux Forums Hacked — IP Address, Username, Email of 2M Accounts Compromised

A Smaller Version of Raspberry Pi 3 Is Coming Soon

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCWorld: A smaller version of the popular Raspberry Pi 3 will go on sale in a few months. Raspberry Pi is developing a new version of its Compute Module, a single-board computer that plugs into specific on-board memory slots. The new Pi will be more like a mini-computer inside a computer, and it won’t come with a power supply. The Compute Module will have similar circuitry to that of Raspberry Pi 3, a wildly successful computer that can be a PC replacement. But it will be smaller, with the memory, CPU, and storage embedded tightly on a board. While the Compute Module will have a 64-bit ARM processor like the Pi 3, it won’t have Wi-Fi, Eben Upton, founder of Raspberry Pi, said in an interview with IDG News Service. The Compute Module could ship as soon as this quarter, Upton said. It will be priced similar to its predecessor, the 2-year-old Compute Module, available from reseller RS Components for about $24. The older Compute Module is based on the original Raspberry Pi. Like Raspberry Pi 3, the new Compute Module will work with Linux and Microsoft’s Windows 10 IoT Core, Upton said. A Compute Module Development Kit, in which the Compute Module can be slotted for testing, may also be sold. The Development Kit could have multiple connectivity and port options, much like the Raspberry Pi 3. Last month, the biggest manufacturer of the Raspberry Pi, Premier Farnell, was acquired by Swiss industrial component supplier Daetwyler Holding AG for roughly $871 million. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ken May

Tag: technology