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Submission + - Driver Signing To Be Enforced In Next Windows 10 (i-programmer.info) 1

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: The control of what software users can run on their machines is becoming ever tighter. Now Microsoft has announced that only signed drivers will work in the next release of Windows 10.
Before you start to panic about backward compatibility with existing drivers the lockdown is only going to be enforced on new installations of Windows 10. If you simply upgrade an existing system then the OS will take over the drivers that are already installed. Only new installations, i.e. installing all drivers from scratch, will enforce the new rules from Windows 10 version 1607.
Be warned, if you need to do a fresh install of Windows 10 in the future you might find that your existing drivers are rejected.
There's an xkcd for that: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fxkcd.com%2F1144%2F

Submission + - Coursera Relaunches Classic Computer Science Courses (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Following up a recent Slashdot item on Coursera trashing historically important classic courses and all because they are moving to a new platform with better money making prospects.
The good news is that Coursera have "done the right thing" — although it is still a bit confused and with no announcement it could well be missed.
Coursera has a list of 90 courses that have transitioned to the new platform since the old one shut on June 30th and it includes 25 Computer Science ones and the all important Hinton course on neural networks. Most of the courses are free but there are no certificates of completion or anything else. While they have specified start dates and cohorts of students will be encouraged to complete them within a set number of weeks, without graded assignments there may not be the same impetus as for the original courses or as for newer courses designed specifically for the new platform.

Submission + - Coursera Commits Cultural Vandalism As Old Platform Shuts (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Coursera has announced that 30 June is the date when it will shut down the servers hosting courses that were the first, free, offerings on its platform. The new model isn't just a revised interface, it is also a new monetization model, and presumably the decision to throw out all the original free content, by shutting the platform, is motivated by greedy commercialism. You could say that the golden age of the MOOC is over with the early enthusiastic pioneers doing it because they were passionate about their subject and teaching it being replaced by a bunch of "lets teach a course because its good for my career and ego" with subjects being selected by what will sell.
Closing down the old platform is unnecessary destruction of irreplaceable content. Coursera needs to rethink this policy that goes against everything it originally stood for. The courses effected are from the early days of the MOOC that are likely to be important in the history of their subject.
The most relevant for us, but far from the only one, is Geoffrey Hinton's Neural Networks for Machine Learning which gave a "deep" insight into the way he thinks and how neural networks work. Making it unavailable is an act of needless cultural and academic vandalism. Hinton is one of the founding fathers of neural networks and deep neural networks, Surely this is a historic document that cannot simply be erased or assigned to some inaccessible digital blackhole.
Something has to be done to preserve this important record — they don't have to turn off the servers just because they have a new platform.

Submission + - On the 25th anniversary of Classic VB, Return It To Its Programmers (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: To celebrate 25 years of VB there is a new request on User Voice,
On the 25th anniversary of Classic VB, Return It To Its Programmers
Microsoft has been asked a number of times to open source VB6. This has been repeatedly rejected without any real reason being given.
However to remove a language from its community without an exceptional reason is an act of vandalism. The new Microsoft claims to back open source, why not in this case?
There is no need for Microsoft to do any more work on the code base — simply open source it and allow the community to keep it alive. Don't deride the attempt to make Classic VB open source if you are happy with .NET. There is no doubt C# and VB .NET are sophisticated well designed languages and perhaps you, like me, have no desire to return to VB6 or anything like it. Vote for the proposal not because you want to use VB6 or that you think it is worth having — Vote for it because a company like Microsoft should not take a language away from its users.

Submission + - Alpha Go Takes the Match 3-0 (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Google's AlphaGo has won the Deep Mind Challenge, by winning the third match in a row of five against the 18-time world champion Lee Se-dol. AlphaGo is now the number three Go player in the world and this is an event that will be remembered for a long time. Most AI experts thought that it would take decades to achieve but now we know that we have been on the right track since the 1980s or earlier. AlphaGo makes use of nothing dramatically new — it learned to play Go using a deep neural network and reinforcement learning, both developments on classical AI techniques.
We know now that we don't need any big new breakthroughs to get to true AI.
The results of the final two games are going to be interesting but as far as AI is concerned the match really is all over.

Submission + - Mozilla Jumps On IoT Bandwagon (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Mozilla has been clarifying some of its plans to convert the Firefox OS project into four IoT based projects. At a casual glance this seems like a naive move that is doomed to failure.
We have Project Link — a Siri/Cortana/Alexa clone, Project Sensor Web a distributed data gathering network, Project Smart Home and Project Vaani — an voice interface for IoT.
With Firefox losing market share and projects like Firefox OS, Thunderbird, Shumway and Persona closing down perhaps Mozilla should try and find its way back to core concerns. All four of the projects need significant AI expertise and a powerful cloud computing resource neither of which Mozilla is likely to be able to afford.

Submission + - Raspberry Pi 3 With WiFi And Bluetooth (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Details of the next in the family of the successful Raspberry Pi family have become available as part of FCC testing documents. The Pi 3 finally includes WiFi and Bluetooth/LE. Comparing the board with the Pi 2 it is clear that most of the electronics has stayed the same.
A Raspberry Pi with built in WiFi and Bluetooth puts it directly in competition with the new Linux based Arduinos, Intel's Edison and its derivatives, and with the ESP8266 — a very low cost (about $2) but not well known WiFi board. And of course, it will be in competition with its own stablemates. If the Pi 3 is only a few dollars more than the Pi 2 then it will be the obvious first choice. This would effectively make the Pi Zero, at $5 with no networking, king of the low end and the Pi 3 the choice at the other end of the spectrum.
Let's hope they make more than one or two before the launch because the $5 Pi Zero is still out of stock most places three months after being announced and it is annoying a lot of potential users.

Submission + - Yahoo Closes Lab - Among Other Things (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: In its recent earnings call, Yahoo revealed plans to cut its workforce by 15% — around 1,600 employees by the end of the year. Yahoo Labs is another a victim of the cuts as revealed in a Tumbler post by Yoelle Maarek who reports that both Yahoo’s Chief Scientist, Ron Brachman, and VP of Research Ricardo Baeza-Yates, will be leaving the company and that going forward:
Our new approach is to integrate research teams directly into our product teams in order to produce innovation that will drive excellence in those product areas. We will also have an independent research team that will work autonomously or in partnership with product partners. The integrated and independent teams, as a whole, will be known as Yahoo Research.
Maarek, formerly VP of Research now becomes leader of Yahoo Research.
To anyone who has followed the story of research at Yahoo there will be a sense of deja vu. Back in 2012 Yahoo laid off many of its research team, many of whom found a new home with Microsoft. It was Marissa Meyer who in the following year recruited a substantial number of PhDs to Yahoo Labs which initiated some interesting projects.
Meyer clearly thought that research might save Yahoo! but now it all seems a bit late and Yahoo! can't save its research lab.

Submission + - Where Are The Raspberry Pi Zeros? (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: No matter how you spin it the Pi Zero is remarkably good value for a one-off or a repeat-production IoT project.
It also has one big advantage over similarly priced alternatives — a community and a track record. There are so many Pis out there that it has a stability that any IoT developer will find reassuring. Thus when the Pi Zero at $5 was announced it was a knockout blow for many of its competitors.Suddenly other previously attractive devices simply looked less interesting. The $9 C.H.I.P, the $20 CodeBug and even the free BBC MicroBit lost some of their shine and potential users.
But the Pi Zero sold out.
The Pi Zero was supposed to be available from November 26, 2015. It is now the start of February and all of the stockists, including the Pi Swag Shop, are still showing out of stock. That's two whole months, and counting, of restricted supply which is more than an initial hiccup.
Of course you would expect enough to be made available initially to meet the expected demand.
The Pi sells something in the region of 200,000 per month so what do you think the initial run of the Pi Zero actually was?
The answer is 20,000 units. Of which 10,000 were stuck to the cover of MagPi and "given away" leaving just 10,000 in the usual distribution channels. And yet Eben Upton, founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, commented:
"You'd think we'd be used to it by now, but we're always amazed by the level of interest in new Raspberry Pi products,"
Well yes, you really would think that they might be used to it by now and perhaps even prepared for it.
At the time of writing the Pi Zero is still out of stock and when it is briefly in stock customers are limited to one unit.
A victim of its own success, yes, but the real victims are the Raspberry Pi's competitors.

Submission + - Fewer Degrees Of Separation With Facebook (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Six degrees of separation is the, already well established, idea that any individual is connected to any other via six network nodes. New research — Three and a half degrees of separation has discovered that the average between Facebook users is just three and a half.

We know that people are more connected today than ever before. Over the past five years, the global Facebook community has more than doubled in size. Today we’re announcing that during that same time period, the degrees of separation between a typical pair of Facebook users has continued to decrease to 3.57 degrees, down from 3.74 degrees in 2011. This is a significant reflection of how closely connected the world has become.

This may all be true and Facebook makes us better connected, but it leaves the question of the quality of the connections open. Are Facebook friends anything like real friends?

Submission + - Femto Fairy Lights - Touchable Holograms (i-programmer.info) 2

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: One method of creating a volumetric, i.e. true 3D, display, is to use a high power laser and focus it on a small spot in space. The air in that spot will be heated to the point where it ionizes and glows with a bright blue light. Scan the laser really fast and you can make a full 3D arrangement of glowing points of light — not exactly a hologram but as good as.
Of course, the big problem is that you have a lot of energy being focused on small areas and human interaction could be a problem. You might well get burned by the laser if you attempted to touch or interact with the display. The solution is to use a really fast laser, a femtosecond laser, that heats a small spot to a high temperature but only for a very short time. This is much safer because the total energy involved is smaller. This is the reason you can touch sparks without getting burned.
The idea is very simple but getting it to work is a tough problem and so far the "holograms" are small very small — but still amazing — see the video.
If you are thinking of the sort of "hard light" projector that created holograms in Star Trek then you have the right idea. Yes, this system makes it possible to touch light.

Submission + - Create Your Favourite Actor From Nothing But Photos (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: If you always wanted to see John Wayne play the lead in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly you might not have to wait much longer. A University of Washington team has essentially reversed engineered what makes an actor recognizable as that actor, or as the title of the paper puts it "What Makes Tom Hanks Look Like Tom Hanks".
  https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhomes.cs.washington.ed...
  It explains how using nothing but photos and videos from the web it is possible to create an actor puppet that follows the expressions of a driver i.e. a puppeteer. Now your really can see actors perform things they never got round to performing.
The model of the "puppet"is first created using photos.from the web. The next stage is to analyse a video of the "driver", i.e. to work out the deformations in the puppet needed to make it follow the driver.
The real innovation is working out how to convert the movement of one person into those of the actor so that the actor remains recognizable. You might think that its would be complicated because everyone smiles in a different way and Tom Hanks smile is, well, unique. What they discovered is:
"After a great deal of experimentation, we obtained surprisingly convincing results using the following simple recipe: use actor B’s shape, B’s texture, and A’s motion (adjusted for the geometry of B’s face)."
So it seems that it is sufficient to use the movements generated by the driver and simply modify them to take account of the geometry of the actor's face.
Although the researchers don't draw any conclusion from this, it suggests that the character of an actor comes about from displaying a universal human facial expression using the physiology they happen to have.
So much for acting...

Submission + - GPS Always Overestimates Distances (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Have you had a suspicion that your GPS app is overestimating the distance traveled? It is something that runners and walkers complain about a lot.
If so you are probably correct but the reason isn't an algorithmic glitch. The answer lies in the statistics and it is a strange story.
If you make a measurement and it is subject to a random unbiased error then you generally are safe in assuming that the random component will make the quantity larger as often as it makes it smaller. Researchers at the University of Salzburg (UoS), Salzburg Forschungsgesellchaft (SFG), and the Delft University of Technology have done some fairly simple calculations that prove that this is not the case for GPS distance measurement.
Consider the distance between two points — this is along a straight line and hence it is the shortest distance. Now add some unbiased random noise and guess what this tends to increase the distance. So unbiased errors in position give rise to a biased overestimate of the distance. There is an exact formula for the bias and in some cases it can be more than 20%.
Is there a solution?
Perhaps using velocity measurements and time to work out distance is better — it isn't biased in the same way but how accurate it could be remains to be seen.
So when your fitness band tells you you have run a 4 minute mile — don't believe it.

Submission + - Celebrate the 200th Birthday of George Boole With Logic (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: November 2nd 2015 is the bicentenary of George Boole, dubbed the forefather of modern information technology. To mark the event 55,000 school students globally will be learning about Boolean Logic. Free lesson plans, puzzles and worksheets have been made available in English, Irish and Manadarin and schools in over 30 countries have signed up.
According to the George Boole 200 website,
http://georgeboole.com/about/
set up by University College Cork (UCC), the Irish university where he was the first Professor of Mathematics in the mid-19th century, Boole is:
  an unsung hero of the digital age
who deserves to be recognized as:
  the forefather of the Information Age
An hour-long documentary The Genius of George Boole will be released on November 2 and available to view online until November 16. http://georgeboole.com/events/....
Although Boole did briefly encounter Charles Babbage during his lifetime he wasn't responsible for bringing together binary arithmetic and what we now call Boolean logic. That achievement is down to Claude Shannon who recognised the relevance for engineering of Boole’s symbolic logic. As a result of Shannon's work Boole’s thinking became the practical foundation of digital circuit design and the theoretical grounding of the the digital age.

Submission + - It Is Programmer Day - Why So Apathetic? (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Programmers Day comes around every year and yet each year it seems to be increasingly ignored. Why, when we are trying to encourage children to take up all things computing, is Programmers Day such a big flop? If you've not encountered it before, the idea is that on a specific day we celebrate computer programmers. It is designated to be on the 256th day of the year, which in most years is September 13th and this year, 2015, it falls on a Sunday. If you don't know why its the 256th day then you probably aren't a programmer and there is no point in explaining.
The usual suggestions for things to do on programmer day include telling jokes and other fairly lame stuff. How about instead:
Teach someone to program just a little bit.
Explain why programming is a mode of thought that is incredibly effective.
Point out to an assembled group of people what the world would be like without software.
Describe how much better the world would be if EVERYONE could think algorithmically so getting to real solutions rather than just expressing vague desires about "a better world".
So what are you going to do to stop this opportunity slipping by unmarked?

 

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