sciencehabit shares an article from Science magazine: True blue flowers are a rarity in nature — they occur only in select species like morning glories and delphiniums. Now, researchers have created a genuinely blue chrysanthemum by adding two genes to the normally pink or reddish flower. The advance could be applied to other species — and it may mean that florists wanting to hawk blooms of blue will no longer have to dye them… The next step for Noda and his colleagues is to make blue chrysanthemums that can’t reproduce and spread into the environment, making it possible to commercialize the transgenic flower. But that approach could spell trouble in some parts of the world. “As long as GMO [genetically modified organism] continues to be a problem in Europe, blue [flowers] face a difficult economic future,” predicts Ronald Koes, a plant molecular biologist at the University of Amsterdam who was not involved with the work.

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Source: Slashdot – Scientists Genetically Engineer the World’s First Blue Chrysanthemum

An anonymous reader quotes Microsoft’s Developer blog:
Early adopters on the Windows Insider program will notice that Windows Subsystem for Linux is no longer marked as a beta feature as of Insider build 16251. This will be great news for those who’ve held-back from employing WSL as a mainline toolset: You’ll now be able to leverage WSL as a day-to-day developer toolset, and become ever more productive when building, testing, deploying, and managing your apps and systems on Windows 10… What will change is that you will gain the added advantage of being able to file issues on WSL and its Windows tooling via our normal support mechanisms if you want/need to follow a more formal issue resolution process. You can also provide feedback via Windows 10 Feedback Hub app, which delivers feedback directly to the team.
Microsoft points out that distro-publishers are still responsible for supporting and fixing the internals of their distros — and they have no plans to support X/GUI apps or desktops. And of course, Linux files are not currently accessible from Windows — though Microsoft says they’re working on a fix.

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Source: Slashdot – Microsoft’s ‘Windows Subsystem For Linux’ Finally Leaves Beta

Michael Lauer, member of the core team at OpenMoko, a project that sought to create a family of open source mobile phones — which included the hardware specs and the Linux-based OS — has shared the inside story of what the project wanted to do and why it failed. From his blog post: For the 10th anniversary since the legendary OpenMoko announcement at the “Open Source in Mobile” (7th of November 2006 in Amsterdam), I’ve been meaning to write an anthology or — as Paul Fertser suggested on #openmoko-cdevel — an obituary. I’ve been thinking about objectively describing the motivation, the momentum, how it all began and — sadly — ended. I did even plan to include interviews with Sean, Harald, Werner, and some of the other veterans. But as with oh so many projects of (too) wide scope this would probably never be completed. As November 2016 passed without any progress, I decided to do something different instead. Something way more limited in scope, but something I can actually finish. My subjective view of the project, my participation, and what I think is left behind: My story, as OpenMoko employee #2. On top of that you will see a bunch of previously unreleased photos (bear with me, I’m not a good photographer and the camera sucked as well). [….] Right now my main occupation is writing software for Apple’s platforms — and while it’s nice to work on apps using a massive set of luxury frameworks and APIs, you’re locked and sandboxed within the software layers Apple allows you. I’d love to be able to work on an open source Linux-based middleware again. However, the sad truth is that it looks like there is no business case anymore for a truly open platform based on custom-designed hardware, since people refuse to spend extra money for tweakability, freedom, and security. Despite us living in times where privacy is massively endangered.

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Source: Slashdot – OpenMoko: Ten Years After

The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 5.4. Again, it’s on time, arriving six months after the release of LibreOffice 5.3. From a report: LibreOffice 5.4 is “the last major release of the LibreOffice 5.x family,” and like other point releases is a major one, adding features across all components and incrementally improving compatibility with Microsoft Office document formats. Highlights include a new standard color palette based on the RYB (Red Yellow Blue) color model. File format compatibility improvements include better support for EMF vector images and higher quality rendering of imported PDF files (with support for embedding video in exported PDFs from Writer and Impress). Also added is OpenPGP key support for signing ODF documents in Linux. LibreOffice Writer adds new context menu items for working with sections, footnotes, endnotes and styles. Users can now import AutoText entries from Microsoft Word .dotm templates. The full structure of bulleted and numbered lists is now preserved when pasted as plain text, and users gain the ability to create custom watermarks for their documents via the Format menu.

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Source: Slashdot – LibreOffice 5.4 Adds More New Features, Improves Office File Format Compatibility