Hamill has also made a name for himself in the voice-over community, most notably lending his voice to the Joker in Batman: The Animated Series. Per his recent appearance on The Tonight Show, Starring Jimmy Fallon, the Star Wars actor chatted about voicing Skeletor in Kevin Smith’s animated series Masters of the…
Source: Gizmodo – Mark Hamill Discusses His Role in Masters of the Universe: Revelations
Are you more comfortable singing behind a virtual persona than you are on a real stage? Your reality TV show has arrived. Pitchfork and AV Club report that Fox is launching a “world’s first” avatar singing competition series, Alter Ego, that will have celebrity judges gather in real life to gauge the performances of amateur singers who use avatars to “reinvent themselves.”
You’ll likely recognize the judge panel. Canadian artists Grimes (pictured above) and Alanis Morrissette will join Will.i.am and Nick Lachey in critiquing the music, while Emmy winner Rocsi Diaz will host the affair. Alter Ego debuts sometime in the fall.
It’s an unusual concept, but not necessarily a bad one. In theory, this could help budding talent overcome stage fright or self-esteem issues by using an avatar as a stand-in. It’s certainly a fitting show for a tech-savvy artist like Grimes. It’s just a question of whether or not audiences enjoy the concept. Anonymizing music shows like The Masked Singer have been hits, but they still involve a physical presence for the participants — there’s a chance viewers might not be so thrilled about digital concerts.
Watch Dogs Legion’s first DLC brings back old characters in a shorter and better adventure than the main game.
Source: Kotaku – Watch Dogs Legion’s First DLC Expansion Is So Much Better Than The Main Game
Ubisoft is facing new legal action over alleged sexual harassment throughout the company. Kotaku and Rock Paper Shotgun report that French workers union Solidaires Informatiques and two former Ubisoft staffers have sued the game developer for allegedly enabling a culture of “institutional sexual harassment.” It was supposedly easier for Ubisoft to tolerate misconduct than to address problems, according to the union.
The lawsuit targets several existing and former Ubisoft workers, including former managers Cecile Cornet (head of human resources), Tommy Francois (editorial VP) and Serge Hascoët (global creative director). Company chief Yves Guillemot is also under scrutiny not for direct involvement, but because he’s inherently “responsible” for what happens at Ubisoft.
Ubisoft told Kotaku it had “no further details to share” in response to the claim against the gaming giant. It previously said that it had investigated all claims and taken an appropriate response.
There were already complaints that Ubisoft hadn’t fully tackled allegations like these. Bloomberg sources said that accused managers remained in senior positions, and that staff were reporting sexist and racist activity that went unaddressed.
There’s no certainty the lawsuit will succeed, let alone force institutional changes at Ubisoft. However, it’s evident the company’s initial efforts weren’t enough to satisfy employees. If the allegations are accurate, Ubi might need to take more drastic steps if it’s going to prevent misconduct and the ensuing fallout.
📢 UBISOFT – Dépot de plaintehttps://t.co/iGn5BPDmFHpic.twitter.com/0AIqAhrBFX
— Solidaires Informatique Jeu Vidéo (@SolInfoJeuVideo) July 16, 2021
Long-time Slashdot reader RoccamOccam shares “an interesting take on SQL and its issues from Jamie Brandon (who describes himself as an independent researcher who’s built database engines, query planners, compilers, developer tools and interfaces).
It’s title? “Against SQL.”
The relational model is great… But SQL is the only widely-used implementation of the relational model, and it is: Inexpressive, Incompressible, Non-porous. This isn’t just a matter of some constant programmer overhead, like SQL queries taking 20% longer to write. The fact that these issues exist in our dominant model for accessing data has dramatic downstream effects for the entire industry:
– Complexity is a massive drag on quality and innovation in runtime and tooling
– The need for an application layer with hand-written coordination between database and client renders useless most of the best features of relational databases
The core message that I want people to take away is that there is potentially a huge amount of value to be unlocked by replacing SQL, and more generally in rethinking where and how we draw the lines between databases, query languages and programming languages…
I’d like to finish with this quote from Michael Stonebraker, one of the most prominent figures in the history of relational databases:
“My biggest complaint about System R is that the team never stopped to clean up SQL… All the annoying features of the language have endured to this day. SQL will be the COBOL of 2020…”
It’s been interesting to follow the discussion on Twitter, where the post’s author tweeted screenshots of actual SQL code to illustrate various shortcomings. But he also notes that “The SQL spec (part 2 = 1732) pages is more than twice the length of the Javascript 2021 spec (879 pages), almost matches the C++ 2020 spec (1853) pages and contains 411 occurrences of ‘implementation-defined’, occurrences which include type inference and error propagation.”
His Twitter feed also includes a supportive retweet from Rust creator Graydon Hoare, and from a Tetrane developer who says “The Rust of SQL remains to be invented. I would like to see it come.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – The Case Against SQL
Soft robots still tend to rely on hard electronics to function, but a new invention might reduce that need for unyielding chips. UC Riverside researchers have developed pneumatic computer memory that they used to help a soft robot play the piano.
Instead of conventional transistors and electric circuits, the “air-powered” memory relies on microfluidic valves that control airflow. Atmospheric pressure in a given valve represents a binary “0,” while a vacuum indicates a “1.” The researchers’ memory has a complex-enough array of these valves to function like an 8-bit RAM chip — not exactly powerful, but good enough that a pair of soft robot hands can play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” at a slow but steady pace.
The absence of positive pressure makes this particularly safe — there’s no danger of the memory exploding in mid-use.
The technology is far from ready for everyday use. Besides needed improvements to complexity and speed, a robot would need soft versions of processors and other components to completely eliminate the need for rigid electronics. The goal is clear, however. Pneumatic memory could at least reduce the need for chips in soft robots, and points to a future of completely flexible robotics that shouldn’t hurt you if there’s a collision.
Out this Sunday is the latest update to GNU Binutils as this important collection of binary utilities common to Linux and other platforms…
Source: Phoronix – GNU Binutils 2.37 Released With Support for ARMv9’s Realm Management Extension
“A new production problem has surfaced with Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner, further delaying deliveries of the popular wide-body jets…” writes the Wall Street Journal.
Long-time Slashdot reader phalse phace shares their report:
Boeing halted handing over Dreamliners to airlines in late May, after federal air-safety regulators declined to approve the plane maker’s proposed method of inspecting the jets for previously disclosed production defects. It was the second such pause in the past year…
The Federal Aviation Administration said the newly discovered quality issue posed no immediate safety threat. While the agency will determine whether to require modifications to 787s already in service, the FAA said: “Boeing has committed to fix these airplanes before resuming deliveries…”
The new problem surfaced on part of the aircraft known as the forward pressure bulkhead at the front of the plane, people familiar with the matter said. It involves the skin of the aircraft and is similar to a previously disclosed Dreamliner issue found elsewhere on the planes, one of these people said. It surfaced as part of the FAA’s review of Boeing’s quality checks on newly produced undelivered planes, this person said. The delivery pause has been another setback for the aerospace giant, which has been grappling with various problems in its commercial, defense and space programs in recent years. It is also choking off a key source of cash as Boeing tries to overcome twin crises that resulted from two fatal crashes of its 737 MAX aircraft in late 2018 and early 2019, and the Covid-19 pandemic’s hit to aircraft demand.
The new problem hasn’t raised any immediate safety concerns, but engineers at Boeing and the FAA are trying to understand the defect’s potential to cause premature fatigue on a key part of the aircraft’s structure, people familiar with the matter said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Boeing Slows ‘Dreamliner’ Production After New Manufacturing Issue
AMC Networks, Skybound Entertainment, and Image Comics revealed the new cover to the book The Art of AMC’s The Walking Dead Universe from illustrator Brian Rood.
Source: Gizmodo – The Walking Dead Universe Book Cover Revealed by AMC Networks
Critics have previously claimed that NSO Group spyware was misued to target the media and other innocent people, but new findings might have revealed the extent of that misuse. The Washington Post has shared a multi-partner investigation claiming that NSO’s Pegasus software was used to successfully hack 37 phones, including journalists, activists and the two women closest to murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
The victims were on a 2016-era list of 50,000 phone numbers from countries believed to conduct both extensive surveillance and use of NSO tools, such as Hungary and Saudi Arabia. The list included 1,000 people who didn’t obviously fit the software’s intended criminal targets, including over 600 politicians, 189 journalists, 85 humans rights activists and 65 business executives.
Roughly a dozen Americans working overseas were on the list, but the investigation partners couldn’t conduct forensic studies on most of their phones or find evidence of successful hacks. NSO previously said Pegasus couldn’t be used to snoop on American devices.
NSO flatly denied the claims stemming from the investigation. It maintained that the information had “no factual basis,” and rejected the notion that Pegasus was used to target Khashoggi or his associates. It maintained that it shut down access “multiple times” over past abuses, and that the list was too large to be focused solely on numbers its client countries would have targeted. The company went so far as to hire a libel attorney, Thomas Clare, that accused the investigation partners of having “misinterpreted and mischaracterized” data while making “speculative and baseless assumptions.”
NSO has historically pinned abuse claims on the countries themselves, and has said it reviewed the human rights records of a given nation before doing business.
The report comes a year and a half after Facebook sued NSO for allegedly enabling call exploit attacks against WhatsApp, and mere months after Citizen Lab claimed that NSO software was used to hack Al Jazeera journalists’ iPhones using an iMessage flaw. However true the accusations might be, they’ll at least affect NSO’s reputation — they cast doubt on the company’s assertion that it only serves customers pursuing obvious targets like terrorists.
Source: Engadget – NSO spyware was allegedly used to target activists and journalists
Mike Melanson’s “This Week in Programming” column shares an update on Amazon’s ongoing battle with scalable data search solution ElasticSearch:
Earlier this year, AWS completed its fork of ElasticSearch with the first release of OpenSearch. If you haven’t followed along, the whole affair was a bit of a tug of war between AWS and Elastic, with AWS eventually coming out seemingly on top. After Elastic changed the licensing on ElasticSearch in an attempt to prevent AWS from selling a service based on the then-open-source project, AWS forked the project to release OpenSearch under Apache 2.0, effectively preserving its open source status.
Now, OpenSearch has reached 1.0, which AWS says not only “marks the first production-ready version of OpenSearch,” but also introduces “multiple new enhancements,” such as data streams, trace analytics span filtering, report scheduling and more. The 1.0 release also involved quite a bit of code cleanup, removing proprietary code and marks, and adds the ability to upgrade from ElasticSearch to OpenSearch as if you were performing a normal upgrade of ElasticSearch.
If you’re interested in learning where the project is going, head on over to the public roadmap to learn more.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Amazon’s Elasticsearch Fork ‘OpenSearch’ Reaches General Availability 1.0 Milestone
Just on the heels of Microsoft taking on the cyberweapons market and malware found targeting journalists and politicians, a new cyberweapon has been discovered in a similar fashion. Targeting thousands of activists, journalists, politicians, the piece of malware called Pegasus, from Israeli surveillance company NSO Group, could have been sold
Source: Hot Hardware – Massive Global Pegasus Spyware Campaign Covertly Stalked Politicians, Activists, Journalists
As the world turns and some folks begin returning to the office, I feel it’s a good time to ask our community of open source techies: What’s your work-from-home (WFH) uniform? Do you dress like you would if you were going into the office? Or are you more comfortable in workout clothes or even your PJs? Do you have a template you stick to most days?read more
Source: LXer – 17 open source technologists share their work-from-home uniforms
EA announced today that the next Skate game, which is currently in development, won’t be shown during EA Play 2021 on July 22. It’s another game to add to the growing list of “Stuff That Won’t Be At EA Play 2021.”
Source: Kotaku – The Next Skate Game Won’t Be At EA Play 2021
Is cryptocurrency a capitalistic scam, only benefitting the wealthy? That is what Jackson Palmer, co-founder of Dogecoin, seems to think after reemerging on Twitter to explain his take on the current state of crypto.
On July 14th, Palmer addressed the frequent question of whether he will return to cryptocurrency after leaving Dogecoin behind.
Source: Hot Hardware – Dogecoin Co-Founder Claims Cryptocurrency Is A Scam Driven By Shady Wealthy People
200 miles east of Silicon Valley, “A disproportionate number of people who purchased homes in Tahoe in 2020 are employees of some of the largest tech companies in the Bay Area,” a real estate brokerage firm specializing in data analytics recently told Outside magazine.
Of the 2,280 new-home buyers Atlasa identified throughout the Tahoe region in 2020, roughly 30 percent worked at software companies. The top three employers were Google (54 buyers), Apple (46), and Facebook (34)… There is, however, one glaring issue with all this rapid, high-priced growth: the people who actually make a mountain town run — the ski instructors and patrollers, lift operators and shuttle drivers, housekeepers and snowcat mechanics, cooks and servers — can no longer afford to live there.
Just last year Sierra Sotheby’s found more than 2,350 homes were sold across the Tahoe Basin, for a boggling $3.28 billion (up 86% from the $1.76 billion in 2019), according to the article, which calls the popular tele-working destination a “Zoom town.”
Now the region’s heading into its summer tourist season — but “with a shorthanded workforce, businesses are unraveling,” like the restaurant that simply closed for a week because “We literally do not have enough cooks to operate…”
The evidence is showing up in the ways businesses are cutting back during the peak of the busiest time of year, a time when small business owners in Tahoe typically are trying to make as much money as possible so they can survive the slower times of year…
While the hiring crisis spans far and wide across the nation, in Tahoe, the linchpin is housing. At Tahoe Dave’s, Dave Wilderotter, the owner of Tahoe Dave’s Skis and Boards, starts his employees at $20 an hour. Most of his employees make too much money to qualify for affordable housing. But they don’t make enough money to pay Tahoe’s rent prices, which have risen by 25% to 50% in the past year. Tahoe’s workforce is disappearing because many of them cannot afford to live here any more… Making matters worse, Tahoe’s already minimal long-term rental housing stock is getting eaten up by the very hot real estate market. Many landlords are selling homes they’ve been renting to local workers, leaving those tenants without many options…
“This isn’t just tourism that’s being hit,” says Alex Mourelatos, a business owner on Tahoe’s North Shore who also serves on multiple boards for the North Tahoe Public Utility District and nonprofit groups. “It’s every service industry. Every industry across people, dentistry, legal, everything, Planned Urban Developments, all the special districts, firemen, teachers, all of them.” The hiring crisis has even affected critical services like public transportation. Bus drivers are so hard to come by that the Tahoe Transportation District made the unprecedented decision to shut down an entire bus route down the East Shore.
The district had shuttles but no one to steer the wheel.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Tahoe’s Workforce is Disappearing, As Many Can No Longer Afford to Live There
The first Space Jam starring Michael Jordan was released in 1996 and opened with $27.5 million. By the time the film ended its run, the overall domestic total was $90 million in box office sales.
Source: Gizmodo – Space Jam: A New Legacy Takes Box Office’s Top Spot This Weekend
Along with all the fun in the sun and taking advantage of the extended evening daylight, summer also means sweat. Sure, sweating isn’t limited to June, July, and August, but when the temperatures climb, so too does the tendency to turn into a sweaty mess.
Source: LifeHacker – How to Stop Your Toilet Tank From Sweating
Add another major voice to the chorus of those claiming the next iPhone could have an always-on display. As 9to5Macnotes, Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman used his weekly “Power On” newsletter to say the 2021 iPhone will potentially have an “Apple Watch-like” always-on display with better battery life in addition to a 120Hz refresh rate, a smaller screen notch, an A15 chip and video recording upgrades.
Gurman didn’t outline the always-on screen functionality. However, a past leak from Max Weinbach suggested Apple would use an LTPO (low-temperature polycrystalline oxide) panel that, like on the Apple Watch and a few Android phones, could drop to extremely low refresh rates to offer persistent information without a large hit to battery life. You might see some notifications, battery life and the clock without having to wake up your phone.
The writer also used his newsletter to narrow the time frame for a long-rumored MacBook Pro redesign. He now expects Apple to start mass production of the mini LED-equipped laptops in the third quarter of 2021 (aka this summer) with a launch between September and November. That’s still somewhat vague, but it does suggest you won’t have to wait until next year (or watch for a surprise early announcement).
The new MacBook Pros are rumored to have a ‘flat’ design like the new iMac (minus the colors) while using a more powerful take on Apple’s M1 chip that could support up to 64GB of RAM and more ports. Mini LEDs could deliver a screen that offers high contrast ratios and brightness while keeping battery life in check.
Source: Engadget – More leaks suggest the next iPhone might have an always-on display
Slashdot reader sciencehabit shares news from Science magazine:
When a giant space rock struck the waters near Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula 66 million years ago, it sent up a blanket of dust that blotted out the Sun for years, sending temperatures plummeting and killing off the dinosaurs. The impact also generated a tsunami in the Gulf of Mexico that some modelers believe sent an initial tidal wave up to 1500 meters (or nearly 1 mile) high crashing into North America, one that was followed by smaller pulses.
Now, for the first time, scientists have discovered fossilized megaripples from this tsunami buried in sediments in what is now central Louisiana.
“It’s great to actually have evidence of something that has been theorized for a really long time,” says Sean Gulick, a geophysicist at the University of Texas, Austin. Gulick was not involved in the work, but he co-led a campaign in 2016 to drill down to the remains of the impact crater, called Chicxulub… Cores from the 2016 drilling expedition helped explain how the impact crater was formed and charted the disappearance and recovery of Earth’s life. In 2019, researchers reported the discovery of a fossil site in North Dakota, 3000 kilometers north of Chicxulub, that they say records the hours after the impact and includes debris swept inland from the tsunami.
“We have small pieces of the puzzle that keep getting added in,” says Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, a paleontologist at the University of Vigo who was not involved with the new study. “Now this research is another one, giving more evidence of a cataclysmic tsunami that probably inundated [everything] for thousands of miles.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Scientists Find Evidence of Mile-high Tsunami Generated By Dino-killing Asteroid